Before texts and emails, love was handwritten; we revisit the most intimate and romantic letters from history’s cultural icons.
It’s not that we’re condemning today’s “wyd?” and “ur cute” in the DMs. They’re modern expressions that keep things succinct, born from the brevity and quick pace of typing on digital devices. But long ago, the art of longhand shaped how people expressed love to one another: sentences unfurled, thoughts were composed in near-poetic forms, and romantic feelings were conveyed with an unabashed passion and devotion that were nothing short of ornate. While some might argue this kind of writing was reserved for great thinkers, poets, and artistic behemoths, the truth is that even the average couple of centuries past exchanged letters that make today’s one-liners pale in comparison.
That being said, the world’s most influential figures and creatives really did pen fantastic epistles. Many rode the waves of tumultuous relationships, others shared more peaceful lives—regardless, love was a feeling conveyed in impassioned words and touching language. This Valentine’s Day, we’ve rounded up some of the most memorable of these love letters.
READ ALSO: Loved To The Point Of Invention, Cherished To The Point Of Creation
Frida Kahlo’s Letter To Diego Rivera
We’ll start with the art world’s most famous “power couple.” While painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera had a troubled marriage, there’s no doubting the intensity of their attraction and attachment to one another, most evident in their correspondences.
Here’s a letter from Frida to Diego, taken from the book The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait:
Diego:
Nothing compares to your hands, nothing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days. you are the mirror of the night. the violent flash of lightning. the dampness of the earth. The hollow of your armpits is my shelter. my fingers touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-fountain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours.
Franz Kafka’s Letter To Milena
We might know Kafka as the tortured writer behind the odd tales that dealt with complex realities and morality, including “The Metamorphosis,” but his letters to Milena Jesenká reveal another, more tender and passionate side to him. They’ve become so famous that they’re currently sold as a book, compiled and translated for the world to see.
Theirs was a partnership built on collaboration, with Jesenská among the first to translate his works. She reached out to him as a young journalist, offering to do so, while he was an older writer of little renown. It’s difficult to call them “lovers”—much of their relationship unfolded through written correspondence in the 1920s, when Jesenská was, at the time, trapped in a deeply unhappy marriage to writer Ernst Pollak. Many of her letters were destroyed during World War II; still, what remains are Kafka’s moving lines, which reveal the intellectual and emotional hold she had over him.
Below is a letter from Kafka to Jesenská, dated September 14, 1920:
My first letter had already been sent when yours arrived. Apart from whatever might be underneath—under such things as “fear,” etc.—and which nauseates me, not because it’s nauseating but because my stomach is too weak; apart from all that, it may be even simpler than you say. Something like: when one is alone, imperfection must be endured every minute of the day; a couple, however, does not have to put up with it. Aren’t our eyes made to be torn out, and our hearts for the same purpose? At the same time it’s really not that bad; that’s an exaggeration and a lie, everything is exaggeration, the only truth is longing, which cannot be exaggerated. But even the truth of longing is not so much its own truth; it’s really an expression of everything else, which is a lie. This sounds crazy and distorted, but it’s true. Moreover, perhaps it isn’t love when I say you are what I love the most—you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love. Incidentally, you say the same thing: “they lack the strength to love,” shouldn’t that suffice to distinguish between “beast” and “man”?
Vita Sackville-West’s Letter To Virginia Woolf
Though Virginia Woolf shared a loving relationship with her husband Leonard Woolf, it’s a well-known fact that the writer was queer, having engaged in an explicitly romantic yet covert affair with fellow writer and garden designer, Vita Sackville-West (who was also married to a man), in the 1920s. It was Sackville-West, daring in her gender expression, who would inspire Woolf to write her equally bold novel Orlando.
While Woolf is arguably the most well-known writer between the two, make no mistake, Sackville-West had pen game, shown in this striking letter to Woolf, dated January 21, 1926:
I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way.You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this—But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it …
Please forgive me for writing such a miserable letter.
Elizabeth Taylor’s Letter To Richard Burton
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s romance began on the set of 1963’s Cleopatra (when both stars were already married), and would continue to be defined by a strong push-and-pull relationship for decades marked by two marriages and two divorces.
The couple would join the ranks among Hollywood’s most iconic, their dynamic sealed through the unabashedly devoted letters they exchanged. Below is one from Taylor to Burton, celebrating their 10-year wedding anniversary:
My darling (my still) My husband.
I wish I could tell you of my love for you, of my fear, my delight, my pure animal pleasure of you—(with you)—my jealousy, my pride, my anger at you, at times.
“Most of all my love for you, and whatever love you can dole out to me—I wish I could write about it but I can’t. I can only ‘boil and bubble’ inside and hope you understand how I really feel.
Anyway I lust thee,
Your (still) Wife.
P.S. O’Love, let us never take each other for granted again!
P.P.S. How about that – 10 years!!
Letter Of Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas
Irish writer Oscar Wilde faced his fair share of difficulties in England where homosexuality was illegal until very recently, an obstacle that would censor not only his creative work, like The Picture of Dorian Grey, but even the existence of his own affair with poet and journalist Lord Alfred Douglas.
The two kept their relationship a secret; besides its very existence being illegal, Wilde also met Douglas when he was already married with two kids. Rumors began to spread a little past the affair’s four-year mark, which led to the arrest and two-year hard labor sentence of Wilde: a reputational attack that affected his status greatly, and sent Douglas into exile as well. It’s quite the tragic love story, but Wilde’s surviving letters show us just how much the two meant to one another despite the hostile environment they were in:
My own Darling Boy,
I got your telegram half an hour ago, and just send a line to say that I feel that my only hope of again doing beautiful work in art is being with you. It was not so in the old days, but now it is different, and you can really recreate in me that energy and sense of joyous power on which art depends. Everyone is furious with me for going back to you, but they don’t understand us. I feel that it is only with you that I can do anything at all. Do remake my ruined life for me, and then our friendship and love will have a different meaning to the world.
I wish that when we met at Rouen we had not parted at all. There are such wide abysses now of space and land between us. But we love each other. Goodnight, dear.
Ever yours,
Oscar
Vladimir Nabokov’s Letter To Véra Nabokov
In a similar fashion, Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov’s marriage to his wife Véra wasn’t a perfect one, but it was certainly longstanding, having lasted 52 years. The two met in their 20s, and the fiercely intelligent Véra was undoubtedly the love of his life, so much so that he wrote a poem about her just hours after they first met.
Véra would play the important role of editor, agent, archivist, researcher, and yes, even bodyguard of her husband, famously carrying a pistol in her handbag to protect him from potential assassins as his reputation grew (and polarized) later in his career. His letters to her reveal a man who greatly yearned for and admired her, many of which were collected in the book Letters to Véra.
Below are excerpts of some of his correspondences, which he began upon their first meeting and maintained all throughout their marriage.
I won’t hide it: I’m so unused to being — well, understood, perhaps, — so unused to it, that in the very first minutes of our meeting I thought: this is a joke… But then… And there are things that are hard to talk about — you’ll rub off their marvelous pollen at the touch of a word… You are lovely…
I simply want to tell you that somehow I can’t imagine life without you…
I love you, I want you, I need you unbearably… Your eyes — which shine so wonder-struck when, with your head thrown back, you tell something funny — your eyes, your voice, lips, your shoulders — so light, sunny…
You came into my life — not as one comes to visit … but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps.
