Description:
"My weary mind turns for refreshment to the thought of you as a dusty traveller might sink onto a soft and grassy bank." These tender words, written by Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet in 1853, offer just a hint of the rich collection of lovers' correspondence preserved in Michelle Lovric's Love Letters: An Anthology of Passion. This slim volume is overflowing with excerpted quotations that are artfully arranged around paintings and line drawings with a Victorian flair, and every passionate word is carefully attributed with names, dates, and details. But the excerpted quotations are only a fraction of the book's appeal: the real draw is the letters that Lovric tracked down and photographed in museums and libraries all over the world. In the tradition of Griffin and Sabine, these reproductions are tucked into envelopes and must be removed in order to be read. In this way, Lovric offers us a peek into the legendary relationships of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, and Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin, among others. Capturing the words of lovers--some famous, some not--in their own sometimes-hurried handwriting endows the epistolary with a remarkable sense of history and undeniable passion.
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