Here are five of our favourites.
In Tearing Haste by Deborah Devonshire And Patrick Leigh Fermor
When the youngest of the six Mitford sisters, The Duchess of Devonshire, asked the travel writer and war hero Patrick Leigh Fermor to stay, a lifelong friendship began. The pair shared warmth and a lust for life. Their letters to each other, which span half a century, cover world everything from world events like JFK’s inauguration to weekends at Sandringham. A particularly enjoyable history lesson.
Love Letters: Vita And Virginia
Vita Sackville West and Virginia Woolf met in 1922, when the former was 30 and the latter a decade older. They went on to form a friendship, romance and correspondence that only ended with Woolf’s death in 1941. The Guardian reckons that to read this collection is to watch as ‘one of the great literary love affairs unfolds’.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Letters To Vera
It is arguable that this collection of Nabokov’s letters to his beloved wife Vera tells us more about the writer than anything else ever could. She gave up her career to support Nabokov’s. In turn, he dedicated every one of his books to her and said he ‘would have been nowhere without her’. Their love story last 46 years and we can learn a lot from it today.
Dear Friend And Gardener: Letters On Life And Gardening
Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd were among the most celebrated British gardeners of our time. After they met in 1974, they became great friends. In this volume, which was first published in 1998, they gossip, ruminate and discuss the highs and lows of their gardening calendars with one another. There never was a cosier collection of letters.
Philip Larkin’s Letters Home
The majority of these letters are written by the glorious, gloomy British poet Philip Larkin to his mother, Eva. After he left home, he wrote to her almost every week. Letters that frequent can’t all be goldmines and, sure, the mundanity of the detail in these doesn’t sound gripping when it is described by others here – but give it a whirl yourself. The Guardian puts it well when it says: ‘[Larkin] is such a good writer that he cannot ever be bad – even when he is only tackling the vexed issue of his mother’s linen basket.’
By Becky Ladenburg
April 2023
