Victorian Love Letters in Literature and Art

This title is printed to order. This book may have been self-published. If so, we cannot guarantee the quality of the content. In the main most books will have gone through the editing process however some may not. We therefore suggest that you be aware of this before ordering this book. If in doubt check either the author or publisher’s details as we are unable to accept any returns unless they are faulty. Please contact us if you have any questions.

<>

(Clare Brant, King's College London)

In Victorian times, when postal reforms and technological progress revolutionized communication, letter writing became more widespread than ever. Love letters, in particular, continued to be central in the courtship ritual. However, as new ideas about love and marriage came along, they no longer exclusively represented the quintessential romantic form in the popular imagination.

Through a close analysis of a broad corpus of Victorian correspondences, novels and paintings, this book demonstrates that novelists and painters who dealt with the ever-recurring themes of love and marriage could not refrain from incorporating an epistolary element into their works. Letters still inspired artists of all kinds, and advances in communications, rather than displacing them, made people more aware of the essence and potentiality of this medium.