{"id":195666,"date":"2026-05-06T11:50:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T10:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/centmagazine.co.uk\/?p=195666"},"modified":"2026-05-07T11:46:58","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T10:46:58","slug":"fearless-love-letters-straight-from-your-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.centmagazine.co.uk\/?p=195666","title":{"rendered":"Fearless: Love Letters Straight From Your Heart"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the paper issue of .Cent for summer 2006, entitled ‘Reach Out and Touch’, guest-edited by industrial designer Paul Priestman, he felt it was only right to include a piece on one of the most traditional and romantic forms of communication, <\/em>the art of letter writing. This article is inspired by the letters of artist and writer Virginia Woolf and her lover Vita Sackville-West, and it also explores the founding members and ideals of the Bloomsbury set, an avant-garde literary group that lived around the Bloomsbury area of London. Offsetting this against a modern-day take on handwritten love letters, in a digital world, with insight from Anne Witchard, Kathryn Simpson, and Lydia Fulton, we explore this story of love letters in Fearless: Love Letters Straight From Your Heart<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reminiscing<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m interested in the art of correspondence from a technology perspective. By communicating via email and messaging, we risk losing records of the past. No more rummaging in the attic and finding boxes of letters and postcards written by a younger, perhaps more optimistic and na\u00efve self, remembering lost friends, forgotten incidents. The memory card or CD doesn’t have quite the same appeal, and years on, we will probably find the software obsolete and all the data lost. For me, this throws up opportunities for new products, a tiny SMS printer or products to save your most precious emails in. Don’t let it all go – what will history do without it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul Priestman <\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Love is everywhere, in the air, in our phones, creating connections among people, but these are fleeting and fragile receptacles destined to fade. Once, love was written on paper. Tiny pieces of affection forever crystallise these intricate feelings as long as ink remains. Here, we explore the relationships amongst the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, highlighting a carefree, pure and free-spirited love. By focusing on the profound connection between Virginia Woolf and her lover Vita Sackville-West, and how, in our modern age, we might experience this old-fashioned way of expressing love once again. If text messages and emails are wiped out one day, what will remain as a testimony of our love?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘Don’t let it all go – what will history do without it?<\/em><\/strong>‘<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul Priestman<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Love Story<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anne Witchard<\/a><\/em>: In the mid-1950s, Virginia Woolf\u2019s brother-in-law, Clive Bell, complained of the vague nature of the term Bloomsbury, writing that journalists could not decide whether it referred to ‘a point of view, a period, a gang of conspirators or an infectious disease.’ By then, Bloomsbury had become something of a myth, as well as a label for a despised world of privilege. As with all such groups, there were those amongst them who insisted that they were too varied to constitute a group, but the disclaimer is disingenuous; they did have a good deal in common, and they did think of themselves, and others thought of them, as ‘Bloomsbury’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Bloomsbury Group<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Simply described, the Bloomsbury Group<\/a><\/strong> is the most thoroughly documented literary and artistic coterie in twentieth-century Britain. When Thoby Stephen, the eldest son of Victorian man of letters Leslie Stephen, arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1899, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf were among the first students he met. By 1902, they had all (apart from Bell, who felt the slight his whole life) been elected to the Apostles, a secret society that took its name from the idea that its membership constituted the twelve most intellectually gifted undergraduates from Trinity and King’s Colleges.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Left to right:  ( some members of Bloomsbury) Lady Ottoline Morrell<\/a>, Maria Nys<\/a>, Lytton Strachey<\/a>, Duncan Grant<\/a>, and Vanessa Bell<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

History of London<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since membership in the Apostles was a lifetime affair, the undergraduates (’embryos’) fortunate enough to receive that distinction had the privilege of associating with the ‘angels’ of previous generations. Thus, they found themselves, in the Saturday evening meetings of the society, engaged in discussion with G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Roger Fry, E. M. Forster, and Desmond MacCarthy. John Maynard Keynes was elected in 1903. With the addition of Thoby’s sisters, Vanessa and Virginia, his younger brother Adrian and the artist Duncan Grant, a cousin of Lytton Strachey, these young people formed the nucleus of what would come to be known as the Bloomsbury Group. The name, of course, was taken from the district in London where the Stephen children chose to settle after the death of their father in 1904. In a recent history of London<\/strong><\/a>, a popular historian made the following comment about the phenomenon we know as Bloomsbury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Virginia Woolf<\/strong> 25 January 1882 \u2013 28 March 1941<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The term ‘Bloomsbury’, whether used in approbation or derision, had not all that much to do with the place as a place. The brilliant aura of Lytton Strachey, the Bells, Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf and the rest might almost as easily have been attached to Marylebone or St John’s Wood if two or three of them had happened to live there, although one may doubt if a ‘Marylebonite’ or ‘St John’s Wooder’ would ever have had quite the same ring as ‘Bloomsbury.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social Mobility<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, Bloomsbury as a place is central to our understanding of the Group, just as it was to the way that they saw themselves. The Stephen siblings\u2019 move from the stuffy respectability of their father’s house at 22, Hyde Park Gate, to the shabbier purlieus of Bloomsbury was deliberate. It signified an escape from patriarchal authority and Victorian convention to intellectual freedom and social inhibition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The gulf they crossed between Kensington and Bloomsbury, <\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘the gulf between respectable mummified humbug…. and living’ <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Virginia Woolf<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reformer<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The claustrophobic colours and red plush of Victorian d\u00e9cor were banished from the new house. Paintings are now hung against white walls. Woolf described her sense of optimism at this change, of things never before seen in the darkness of the gloomy Kensington house:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘Watts pictures, Dutch cabinets, blue china-shone out for the first time in the drawing room at Gordon Square\u2026 We were full of experiments and reform\u2026 Everything was going to be new; everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial.’<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, Virginia Woolf, 1976<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bloomsbury at the turn of the century was socially marginal. The smart Georgian townhouses, once family homes of the comfortable middle class, were being divided up into what writer and sometime Bloomsbury resident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘a nests of lodging-houses for hard-up clerks, or nests of the sorrier sort of bordel.’ <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Burke<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bedsitting-rooms of Bloomsbury attracted feminists, Fabians, Asians students attending University College, spiritualists, trade union activists and anarchist emigres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marginal Revolution<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The social and cultural mix of Bloomsbury was symbolic of the marginal and the progressive and would provide a crucial resource in the elaboration of ‘Bloomsbury’ culture, politics and style. The move to their own house enabled Virginia and her sister and brothers to entertain. Thoby invited his Cambridge friends and instituted Thursday evening get-togethers. The fact that Virginia and Vanessa, young, unmarried women, sat in on the gatherings unchaperoned, conversing and swapping philosophies and ideas until the small hours, was considered ‘unsuitable’ social behaviour at the time. Whilst the circle grew closer and more intense, those outside of it grew jealous and judgmental. Their bohemian challenge to Victorian strictures on artistic, social, and sexual issues was disconcerting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom,’ <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maynard Keynes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bloomsbury’s intellectual and artistic achievement was varied and individual rather than collaborative, but as a group, Bloomsbury certainly can be said to have had a philosophy. It was based on G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, published in 1903, marking the year for Lytton Strachey as the beginning of the Age of Reason. Keyes, in retrospect, was even more rhapsodic about Moore’s thinking, saying that the beginning of a renaissance was exciting, exhilarating, it was the opening of a new heaven on a new earth, they were the forerunners of a new dispensation and not afraid of anything. Moore’s Principia Ethica argued that the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects<\/strong><\/a> were the highest states of human consciousness. This demanded a total commitment to ‘personal affections’ and ‘aesthetic enjoyments.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was not, of course, the whole of Moore’s philosophy, but it was the part that appealed to the Cambridge undergraduates and Apostles who later made up Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf’s work can be understood as consistently in dialogue with Bloomsbury ideals. She read the Principia Ethica in 1908, and it appears in her novel, The Voyage Out (1915), where the reader is expected to recognise it from its familiar dark brown binding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Left is George Charles Beresford<\/a> – Virginia Woolf<\/a> in 1902
Right is George Grantham Bain<\/a> Collection (Library of Congress) – Vita Sackville-West<\/a> in 1913<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1907, after Thoby’s untimely death from typhoid fever contracted on a trip to Greece, Vanessa agreed to marry Clive Bell. The couple took over 46 Gordon Square and Virginia, and Adrian moved first into 29 Fitzroy Square and then into shared housing at 38 Brunswick Square, with Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes, and Leonard Woolf, whom Virginia would marry the following year. Bloomsbury now had two social centres and remained a tight-knit and highly exclusive group dedicated to cultivating consciousness and feeling, not just in artistic pursuits but in personal attachments. Moore’s philosophy would prove a dispensation for some remarkable ‘permutations and combinations’ as Keynes would put it.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Duncan Grant and John Maynard Keynes c. 1913<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Four years after Vanessa’s marriage, with the tacit acquiescence of her husband, who had been having a series of affairs, including one with Molly MacCarthy, Vanessa started an affair with Roger Fry. The menage a trois had lasted two years when Fry confided to Clive that Vanessa had transferred her affections to Duncan Grant, who had suddenly (but unhappily for Vanessa, only temporarily) acquired a taste for heterosexuality. Grant had earlier been her brother Adrian’s lover as well as Strachey’s and Keynes’s. Bloomsbury’s commitment to ‘personal affections’ gave one wit cause to remark that Bloomsbury was a place where ‘all the couples lived in Squares and loved in triangles.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although she married Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf<\/a><\/strong> had always formed strong emotional attachments with women. In 1922, she met and fell in love with Vita Sackville-West. They began an affair that lasted through most of the 1920s. As well as her body of fiction and essays, Virginia Woolf left five volumes of diaries and six volumes of letters. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf document their fascination with each other. In 1928, Virginia published the novel Orlando.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature.’<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West’s son.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They remained friends until Virginia died in 1941.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Virginia Woolf is perhaps the most widely known of the Bloomsbury Group. Her essay, A Room of One’s Own (1929), is one of the most significant feminist texts of the twentieth century, and she is recognised today as one of the greatest innovators in twentieth-century fiction. She wrote ten novels that experiment with stream-of-consciousness narrative to present the underlying psychological and emotional motives of characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

E.M. Forster described her work as pushing the English language ‘a little further against the dark.’ Forster felt a strong affinity with the values of the Bloomsbury group, such as the importance of friendship and the persistent questioning of convention and moral values. These values are vividly dramatised in his novel Howards End (1910) and inits significant epigraph, ‘Only Connect.’ The words ‘Only connect…’ (with the ellipsis) follow the title page and precede Chapter 1. After this, Forster employs the phrase when speaking of the relationship between Margaret, who values art and literature, and Henry, who is a businessman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.’ <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Chapter 22, Howards End, 1910<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1917, hoping to distract Virginia from her periodic bouts of black depression, Leonard Woolf bought a small printing press, and together they set up the Hogarth Press. It was named after the house they had moved to in Richmond, and the aim was to publish works that might not appeal to more commercial publishers. To begin with, the books were set and printed by hand in their dining room. Their first publication Two Stories, was written by Leonard and Virginia and illustrated by their friend, Dora Carrington.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard Woolf in 1912<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Avant-garde Art<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 1921, the unexpected success of the Press demanded more sophisticated printing equipment, and it moved to commercial premises in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury. The Hogarth Press published early works by Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood and Vita Sackville-West as well as Virginia Woolf’s novels. It introduced translations of Russian literature by Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and others and published the first English translations of Sigmund Freud, edited by Lytton’s brother, James Strachey. The Press provided a means of collaboration between Bloomsbury writers and artists. Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant provided illustrations and designed book wrappers. Their work was distinctly avant-garde and gave the press an unmistakable house style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1910, Roger Fry, together with Clive Bell and Desmond MacCarthy, organised the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, which gave a startled British public an idea of the innovations<\/strong><\/a> that were happening in art on the continent. The exhibition was a defining milestone for Bloomsbury. A Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition two years later included pictures by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell and a portrait of Lytton Strachey by Wyndham Lewis. In the wake of this exhibition, Fry set up the Omega Workshops Ltd. He wanted to see the bright colours and bold, simplified forms of Post-Impressionism, applied to the decorative arts and interior design, and to remove what he saw as the false division between fine art and the decorative arts. The scheme would also help artists by providing them with the means to earn a living. The Omega Workshops at 33, Fitzroy Square, incorporated public showrooms as well as studios. Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry were named as directors. Fry felt that objects and furniture should be bought for their aesthetic qualities rather than the reputation of the artist, so he insisted that all work was produced anonymously. Designs were marked only with the symbol \u03a9<\/strong>, the Greek letter ‘Omega’. ‘Omega’ is the last letter of the Greek alphabet, and was used to signify the \u2018last word\u2019 on a subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Omega closed in 1919, but became influential in interior design in the 1920s. By this time, Bloomsbury’s reputation as a cultural circle was fully established to the extent that its mannerisms were parodied, and Bloomsbury had become a widely used term connoting an insular, snobbish aestheticism. The homosexuality<\/strong><\/a> of many ‘Bloomsberries’, their conscientious objection during the First World War, their feminism, their championship of French art and not least their private incomes, were black marks as far as many were concerned. The group’s outspoken pacifist beliefs caused further criticism during the Second World War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

World War 2<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wartime pressures intensified Virginia Woolf’s mental instability. Dividing her time between bombed-out Bloomsbury and the Sussex countryside, she suffered a particularly severe bout of depression. On 28th March 1941, she filled her coat pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse, near her country home, Monk’s House in Rodmell. She left a suicide note for Leonard:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this t\u0131me. I begin to hear voices, and can\u2019t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came.. I can’t fight it any longer, I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that, everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer, I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.<\/strong><\/em>‘<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

V. (The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. VI)<\/p>\n\n\n

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Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter to her husband<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bloomsbury biography, letters and journals have proved endlessly fascinating for readers, many of whom have never read a novel by Virginia Woolf or E. M. Forster. In 1996, the death of Leonard Woolf’s heir, Trekkie Parsons, released more letters for publication. Love Letters: Leonard Woolf and Trekkie Ritchie Parsons, 1941-1968 (2002) documents their relationship, which began some months after Virginia’s death. In October of that year, a close friend was ill with terminal cancer. Leonard visited him regularly in London and, during those visits, met Trekkie Ritchie Parsons. She was a painter and illustrator, twenty-two years his junior and married to a publisher who was on active service. When Trekkie’s husband returned, she would spend the weekdays with Leonard in Sussex and the weekends with her husband. With typical Bloomsbury unconventionality, this worked and continued for twenty-five years until Leonard died in 1969.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The continuing fascination with Bloomsbury comes through the variety of its appeal. For some, it is engaged by scholarly or biographical interest in a particular member, for others by aesthetic theories or an interest in lifestyle and the sexual irregularities and gossip of the bohemian 1920s. We are drawn to a world of inverted values where friendship, books and art are valued over commerce. Our attention is caught because, as one critic has put it, Bloomsbury left behind the documents that rivet our attention, the letters, memoirs and journals that reveal inner life and compel the sort of empathy that fiction compels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Russell Square Ordnance Survey Map, 1910<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anne Witchard<\/a><\/em>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘My Darling Virginia,’ ‘Sweet Honey’: Love, Life, Letters<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kathryn Simpson<\/em><\/a>: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West met for the first time on 14th December 1922, and from then on, these two extraordinary women<\/a><\/strong> became lovers and remained friends, talking and writing to one another, expressing their admiration and love for one another, and ‘making each other up’ until the end of Woolf’s life in 1941. Both were writers, and the first contact with Woolf for Sackville-West was through Woolf’s writing. Clive Bell, Woolf’s brother-in-law, had lent her Jacob’s Room to read, and Sackville-West was ‘interested and slightly bewildered’ but also ‘thrilled’ by this, Woolf’s most experimental novel to date.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For slightly different reasons, Woolf herself was equally thrilled and bewildered by Sackville-West, describing her after their first meeting as ‘the lovely, gifted, aristocratic Sackville West,’ whose presence had left Woolf feeling ‘muzzy-headed.’ At this time, both women were at a turning point in their careers – Sackville-West was just becoming established as an author, whose work was in tune with tradition in both style and content, and Woolf had just achieved a breakthrough in developing her innovative narrative methods. They were clearly very different writers and very different women, and one of the most compelling things about their relationship is how they both playfully and seriously negotiated the differences of age, experience, upbringing and perspectives on life and writing. Yet it was these differences that also fuelled the erotic intensity of their relationship in the mid-twenties and continued to sustain the loving and supportive friendship into the 1930s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The majority of the letters exchanged between the two women discuss some element of ‘business’ and reveal the ways in which Woolf and Sackville-West shared a professional life. This is not only because the Woolfs\u2019 Hogarth Press published a good deal of Sackville-West’s writing, but also because Woolf and Sackville-West shared their ideas, opinions, admiration and criticisms of each other’s work and the work of others. This professional connection was central to their relationship, and Sackville-West attributes her growth as a writer, in part, to Woolf’s influence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, it is the tantalising insights into the personal relationship of these two women that are most likely to capture the attention of the reader of their letters today, as they exemplify the ways that these two women did indeed reach out and touch one another through the written word. Their letters chart the fluctuations in their personal relationship, capturing the intoxicating excitement of their more intensely erotic feeling, as well as the resentments, insecurities and sense of rivalry as Sackville-West became involved with other women lovers. Through their letters, they tease and criticise each other, share gossip and intimacies, and take on fantasy identities, notably of dogs, in order to express their intimate feelings for one another and to negotiate some of the more painful and sensitive areas of their relationship. For instance, after their first love-making and with Sackville-West’s departure for Persia imminent, they measured their feeling for one another in relation to their devotion to their dogs: for Sackville-West to have Woolf’s love ‘forever and ever’ she must ‘break out into spots’ on her back, like Woolf’s dog, Grizzle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later, masking her affair with Mary Campbell, Sackville-West assures Woolf that she remains ‘Virginia’s good puppy’ and later still, Sackville-West assumes the identity of a faithful shabby sheepdog called Towser. Woolf also takes on the identity of a dog called Potto, a light-hearted, playful, child-like creature who can express Virginia’s need for love and maternal care, a persona that perhaps makes it easier for Sackville-West to provide such love, care and happiness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of the most beautiful and moving letters are those written when Sackville-West spent long periods of time in Tehran with her diplomat husband, Harold Nicolson. In these letters, Sackville-West is desperate to share her experience of this new and exciting place with Woolf, but also to see this foreign place through Woolf’s eyes and imagination. This desire is not only to reveal new geographical places for each other but also to open up the possibilities of new experiences, to entice one another beyond the boundaries of what is familiar and known and to explore foreign territory of all kinds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of all, their letters, written over almost twenty years, are testimony to the longing and sometimes the struggle to know one another better, as friends and lovers and as fellow writers. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf’s character, Lily Briscoe, reflects on her loves and loss, realising that ‘Love<\/strong><\/a> had a thousand shapes’ and that lovers can have the gift of giving a certain wholeness to things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The love between Woolf and Sackville-West also had many facets and, although the letters that remain are not complete, what does clearly emerge is the feeling that Sackville-West expresses, that her love for Woolf is ‘absolutely true, vivid, and unalterable,’ and so it seems to have been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kathryn Simpson<\/em>
<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Bloomsbury Group<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clive Bell (1881 – 1964) art critic<\/em>, Vanessa (Stephen) Bell (1879- 1961) painter<\/em>, Roger Fry (1866- 1934) art critic and painter<\/em>, Duncan Grant (1885 – 1978) painter<\/em>, John Maynard Keynes (1883 – 1946) economist,
<\/em>Desmond MacCarthy journalist and editor<\/em>, Thoby Stephen the Cambridge connection<\/em>, Adrian Stephen psychoanalyst,<\/em> Lytton Strachey (1880 – 1932) historian,<\/em> Leonard Woolf (1880 – 1969) writer, publisher and civil servant<\/em>, Virginia (Stephen) Woolf (1882 – 1941) writer and publisher,<\/em> E.M. Forster (1879 -1970) writer,<\/em> Dora Carrington (1893 – 1932) painter<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Love on the Data Highway<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lydia Fulton<\/em><\/a>: In a time of modern technology and instant messaging, the idea of writing and posting a letter, instead of emailing or texting, may appear redundant to some. Technology may mean that we can contact someone across the world, sharing words within a few moments; however, do these messages make our past disposable and instead of having correspondence to look back on in times to come, is it possible that any trace of communication will have been deleted? For me, it is more important than ever now to celebrate the traditional act of letter writing, so in one of our .Cent meetings discussing this issue, I suggested the idea of love letters, in particular those of Virginia Woolf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Handwritten letters<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am not a very technical person, and so maybe this is why, for me, handwritten letters<\/strong><\/a> are not only romantic but are the ultimate form of communication, and the idea of a creative, such as Virginia Woolf, corresponding through handwritten letters to her friends and lovers, and us now being able to read these letters, eighty years later, amazes me. In an issue dedicated to ‘Reach Out and Touch’, it seemed only right that we dedicate space to some of these letters and that I share some of my own story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I met my husband, Casey, in a tiny club called Timepiece<\/em> in Devon. He was surrounded by friends who were attempting to break dance, and I watched him from the corner with my one-pound can of Red Stripe, trying to convince myself to approach him. Within one week, we had our first date, and I received my first love letter from him. That was six years ago, I now have collected dozens and dozens of letters, some typed on squared paper, some handwritten on airmail sheets; all of which are meticulously tied up with string, labelled in order and stored in a cupboard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The act of letter writing has always been a necessary tool for us. Within six months of our meeting, Casey moved away to study for his M.A, then I travelled abroad for months at a time, and so it was only one year ago that we finally moved in together. In the times whilst we were apart, handwritten love letters acted as a comfort to one another, a tool to convey our thoughts and share small but significant facts about our daily routines, trying to keep our lives as close as possible, even though we were hundreds of miles apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The arrival of letters from Casey diminished during some periods of my travel, and so I started to create an archive of his emails to me. In the times when we were constantly travelling, I had no fixed address for him to send mail; however, there was always an internet caf\u00e9, even within the tiniest of villages, where I could check and save my emails. I would accumulate ten or so emails and then print them out, tie them carefully together and hide them in a notebook at the bottom of my rucksack until the time came to add to them again. The act of stowing them at the bottom of my bag was of great significance as the emails were so precious to me, and the continuous packing and unpacking of travelling meant that unless I was careful, they could be easily lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to these letters and emails, I saved and am still saving another form of written communication from him: text messages. In a way, these texts are tiny, condensed letters. The act of writing down his text messages means the day-to-day activities, events and emotions we have shared have been preserved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Telegram<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The nature of text messaging, like email, is to read and delete; however, by carefully noting down each message, they change from being disposable words in technology<\/strong><\/a> into actual words in a notebook and can serve, like a traditional letter, as a record of our shared history. I recently found a telegram that my grandpa sent to my grandma sixty years ago. He sent it for her twenty-fifth birthday from overseas during the war. The text, stuck onto the telegram in strips to create the message, resembles how I would imagine an early form of text message to be, with the numbered, ready-made phrases such as \u2018(30) Darling.\u2019 reminding me of the prepared template messages programmed into technology. The fact that this telegram has survived for so many years and can be re-read by me, two generations after it was created, assures me of the importance of saving correspondence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The habit of typing up Casey’s texts has now developed into a necessary routine. Once I have accumulated a good number of messages, I carefully write down each one, making sure every letter, word, space and even spelling mistake (which can be frequent, due to predictive text) is copied exactly as it appeared in the text. The messages vary from the planning of a weekend away, \u201808.08.2002 12.02 pm okay six o’clock it is my wee chestnut. bournemouth ce soir, Paris ce demain. je loves you. <\/em>Casey\u2019 to reminiscing about a trip-once we are home; \u201808.09.2002 10.40 am I love you. nice to remember our romance in bonne France. j’adore mademoiselle. love casey.<\/em>\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

1943 Egyptian State Telegraphs<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In transcribing every single text message Casey has sent me over the past sixty-six months, I now have a collection of over two thousand six hundred of them. The rituals that accompany the copying out and saving of every message are a testimony to the importance of creating a written history, so that it can serve as a record of times past and be saved, like the sepia telegram, for years to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lydia Fulton<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a world where digital spaces take over all our habits, we need more than ever to leave tangible traces of our affection. This way, in a century or a millennium, when historians, your descendants, or even a visitor from outer space finds these pieces of paper, they will discover testaments that even in a world filled with tension, love always wins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anne Witchard, <\/strong>lecturer of English Literature<\/a> at the University of Westminster.
Kathryn Simpson,<\/strong>\u00a0Senior lecturer<\/a> at Cardiff Metropolitan University.
Lydia Fulton,<\/strong> writer<\/a>.
Paul Priestman,<\/strong> Creative Director and Chairman<\/a> of PULI innovation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you enjoyed reading <\/em>Fearless:<\/em> Love Letters Straight From Your Heart<\/em><\/strong>,<\/em> then why not read Hands are Amazing<\/strong> <\/em>here.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

.Cent Magazine, London. Luxury Mindset<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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