Examines letter writing among poets in the last 200 years. Poets discussed include Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley in the nineteenth century and Eliot, Yeats, Bishop and Larkin in the twentieth century. Divided into three sections--Contexts and Issues, Romantic and Victorian Letter Writing and Twentieth-century Letter Writing--the volume demonstrates that real letters still have an allure.
All of the available letters of Charles Lamb, a master of the English essay, and his sister Mary Anne published in this definitive, scrupulously edited work. The letters, many of them written to illustrious figures of the Romantic period, are generally agreed to rank among the finest in the English language. Transcribing where possible from the originals or facsimiles, Professor Marrs corrects textual errors found in previous editions, and he pays particular attention to establishing precise dates for the correspondence. He includes letters that were omitted from the last collection (published in 1935 and long out of print), and he has uncovered more than eighty letters never published before. The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb totals five or six volumes, and presents nearly 1200 letters written by Charles and Mary, singly or together. The correspondence is fully annotated, the volumes are illustrated, and the holographic idiosyncrasies of the originals are rendered typographically wherever possible. Rich in revelations about the extraordinary lives of the Lambs, these beautifully written letters are an inexhaustible store of information about the Romantic era and its major figures-Wordsworth, Keats, and Coleridge. The publication of unexpurgated and authoritative texts is an important literary event. The first volume was published in 1975, the bicentenary of Charles Lamb's birth. It contains 102 letters written by Charles, many of them after Mary murdered their mother. Among the recipients were the poets Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth. The letters provide shrewd observations on his friends' writings and his own, vivid descriptions of life in London, and compassionate but candid remarks concerning his family and acquaintances. Notes to each letter place it in context, quoting where necessary from the correspondence Lamb is answering. Volume I includes Professor Marrs's extensive Introduction to the entire collection. After supplying a biography of the Lamb family up to the murder, he treats Mary's and Charles's life together until Charles's death, tracing through the letters a relationship that remained warm and affectionate even under the shadow of Mary's insanity. Professor Marrs also gives the publishing history of the letters and sets forth the principles upon which his edition is based.
Throughout her fifty-year career, Harriet Martineau's prolific literary output was matched only by her exchanges with a range of high-profile British, American and European correspondents. This set focuses on the letters written by Martineau, contextualising the correspondence through annotation of the highest standard. Volume 2 covers her letters from 1837–1845.
This five-volume set brings together the surviving letters penned by Harriet Martineau, the nineteenth-century writer and women’s rights advocate. Throughout her fifty-year career, Harriet Martineau's prolific literary output was matched only by her exchanges with a range of high-profile British, American and European correspondents. This set focuses on the letters written by Martineau, contextualising the correspondence through annotation of the highest standard. This book is a unique and highly valuable resource for students of, and others interested in, the history of feminism.
