800 Years Of Women's Letters (2011) - Plot & Excerpts
There is little extant correspondence between friends until the time of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when she, her sister Lady Mar, and fellow writers shared their ideas and feelings on a range of personal and public issues. A group of wealthy eighteenth-century intellectuals, named bluestockings by Dr Johnson, displayed both political commitment and the ability to work together on many philosophical, social and governmental issues. Women in the nineteenth century continued this tradition of collaboration. Friendship provided a rampart against solitude and incomprehsnsion and against the social indignities which many spinsters were forced to undergo. Friendships between sisters proved vitally supportive, as did correspondence between writers, often isolated or underappreciated. Fanny Burney was delighted to meet Madame de Staël in 1792, as Virginia Woolf was to meet Vita Sackville-West in 1926. (However, with her novelist’s honesty, Woolf realized that envy slightly undermined her response to Katherine Mansfield.) The second part of this section deals with ‘romantic friendship’ a more evocative term than lesbian to describe close, loving, possibly sexual relationships between women.
What do You think about 800 Years Of Women's Letters (2011)?
