A love letter is a romantic way to express feelings of love in written form. Whether delivered by hand, mail, carrier pigeon, or romantically left in a secret location, the letter may be anything from a short and simple message of love to a lengthy explanation of feelings. Love letters may 'move through the widest range of emotions - devotion, disappointment, grief and indignation, self-confidence, ambition, impatience, self-reproach and resignation'.[1] One of the first love letters in the world, mentioned more than 5000 years ago, is one carried from Rukmini to Krishna by her Brahmin messenger Sunanda. This letter appears in the Bhagavatha Purana, book 10, chapter 52.
Examples from Ancient Egypt range from the most formal – 'the royal widow . . . Ankhesenamun wrote a letter to the king of the Hittites, Egypt's old enemy, begging him to send one of his sons to Egypt to marry her' – to the down-to-earth: let me 'bathe in thy presence, that I may let thee see my beauty in my tunic of finest linen, when it is wet'.[2] Imperial China might demand a higher degree of literary skill: when a heroine, faced with an arranged marriage, wrote to her childhood sweetheart, he exclaimed, 'what choice talent speaks in her well-chosen words . . . everything breathes the style of a Li T'ai Po. How on earth can anyone want to marry her off to some humdrum clod?'[3]
In Ovid's Rome, 'the tricky construction and reception of the love letter' formed the centre of his Ars Amatoria or Art of Love: 'the love letter is situated at the core of Ovidian erotics'.[4] The Middle Ages saw the formal development of the Ars dictaminis, including the art of the love letter, from opening to close. For salutations, 'the scale in love letters is nicely graded from "To the noble and discreet lady P., adorned with every elegance, greeting" to the lyrical fervours of "Half of my soul and light of my eyes . . . greeting, and that delight which is beyond all word and deed to express"'.[5] The substance similarly 'ranges from doubtful equivoque to exquisite and fantastic dreaming', rising to appeals for 'the assurance "that you care for me the way I care for you"'.[6]
The love letter continued to be taught as a skill at the start of the eighteenth century, as in Richard Steele's Spectator.[7] Perhaps in reaction, the artificiality of the concept came to be distrusted by the Romantics: '"A love-letter? My letter – a love-letter? It . . . came straight from my heart"'.[8]
consistently linked desire and the letter: 'The function of desire is a last residuum of the effect of the signifier in the subject'.[23] Indeed, he called a late seminar "A Love Letter", emphasising therein that 'speaking of love is in itself a jouissance '.[24] It was perhaps with respect to the love letter that he conceded that 'in the life of a man, a woman is something he believes in...believes her effectively to be saying something. That's when things get stopped up — to believe in, one believes her. It's what's called love'.[25] Fortunately (he added) 'Believing a woman is, thank God, a widespread state — which makes for company, one is no longer all alone'.[26]
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