A bit of Heaven: the arcane art of letter-writing April 30, 2008
I walked home with Mattie beneath the silent moon, and wished for you, and Heaven. You did not come, Darling, but a bit of Heaven did, or so it seemed to us, as we walked side by side and wondered if that great blessedness which may be ours sometime, is granted now, to some. Those unions, my dear Susie, by which two lives are one, this sweet and strange adoption wherein we can but look, and are not yet admitted, how it can fill the heart, and make it gang wildly beating, how it will take us one day, and make us all it’s own, and we shall not run away from it, but lie still and be happy!…My heart is full of you, none other than you is in my thoughts, yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me. If you were here — and Oh that you were, my Susie, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language. ~Emily Dickson in a letter to Susan Gilbert, 1852~
A penfriend of mine wrote to me in her first letter these exact words: “Don’t you just LOVE the Victorians?” My answer to her was a resounding YES! and I have adored her ever since.
I have always had an abiding love if 19th century history and literature. I am always so excited when I meet someone who shares this passion, as nerdy as it is. In fact, that is one of the main reasons I joined the penpal site www.interpals.net. I wanted to meet other women out there who were passionate about the dying art of handwritten letters and ardent correspondences, the kind of letters Emily Dickinson wrote to her sister-in-law, Susan. The kind of letters the Bronte sisters wrote to one another and their few close friends. In the 19th century, daily letter writing was the only way to stay in close contact with the people one loved most, the dear friends and relatives who lived outside the range of easy visitation. Letter-writing was an important diversion for people, and not only women—but as I am a woman, I am principally interested in the passionate friendships women developed between them, and the intimacy of the 19th century letter.
Of course, meeting someone like-minded is very difficult in this day and age. We are conditioned to prefer the ease and efficiency of emailing. And of course, email has its place—how easy it is to stay in constant contact with our friends and loved ones who might not be inclined to put pen to paper! I often think that email really is the modern-day equivalent to letter-writing, and instead of despairing that such a genteel art has been lost and bastardized for good, I must instead rejoice that people are at least still writing to one another. And there are those perverse members of the population who are still interested in pursuing letter-writing as an art form and pastime. I have been very lucky in meeting many women on interpals who have been adventurous and arcane enough to become penfriends with me, and of course I have my favourites among them (the lady who loves the Victorians, for a start—her letters are wonderful, full of mythology and esoteric trivia—she has as much of a passion for history as I do). When I am seated at my table, pen in hand, a sheet of beautiful and carefully chosen paper before me, I feel time slip away. I am not\ longer a woman writing a letter to a friend in 2008, a secret Luddite aficionado. I am a woman of another time—of all time. I feel a strong kinship with the women of the ages, whose passions spilled from their pens in a flood of India ink.
Does time do that for you? Are there moments when it slips away, like the strap of a silk slip from your shoulder, and you could be anywhere, anywhen? I confess that happens to me more and more—when I am sitting at my vanity, dusting my nose with powder, or smoothing the quilt over my bed—lighting a candle at dusk. Okay, I admit to a propensity for antique furniture and archaic gadgets, and so it is easy in my house to imagine the 21st century away. But I love that. I love to be able to cheat time a little, to feel as though the worlds that I have loved since I began reading are present in this very moment, are no further than a hair’s breadth from me. That the veil could slip away, gossamer-fine, and everything I hate about my own world could be escaped.
Hopelessly romantic? Yes. Unapologetically so. And isn’t that why we read and write historical fiction? Isn’t that why they have made so many movies recently about the speculated life of Jane Austen, and why period dramas imported from the BBC are so popular? We want to escape, don’t we, our own time, if only for awhile. At least, I do. And so I write letters by hand, and bake cakes from scratch, and read novels the authors of which were dead 150 years before I was born. I am a romantic, but not a hopeless one. A hopeful one, rather. Hopeful that my own time will capture the imaginations of generations to come, that this decade will seem only a breath away for some dreamy woman in 2108, a copy of The Collected Letters and Emails of Sarah Jane Swift within easy reach of her bedside :o) That one need only blow out a penny candle to bring me near. To bring all of us who live here and now near.
Love, Sarah Jane.
