Love Letters of Great Men

Maybe your first was a note passed during math class. Perhaps an IM? Maybe it was on a mustard stained napkin left in your lunch box, sent during recess, or on a slightly drunken Friday night text. Whenever, wherever, it is clear that theses days love letters just aren’t what they used to be.

We’ve replaced flourishing tirades of analogy, symbolism and colorful innuendo, with “dinner 2 night?” We’ve replaced an elaborate dance of subtle social positioning with “& movie?”

So it was no surprise that all across America young-hearted women collectively sighed and swooned as Carrie Bradshaw read aloud from “Love Letters of Great Men” to Big in the movie “Sex and the City.” And just as predictably droves of women clamored for copies of their own. Here’s the bittersweet part. It didn’t exist. Devised

solely as a prop for the story line, “Love Letters of Great Men” was a mere plot device.

Frustrated, annoyed, and disappointed, our collective complaining resounded at Barnes and Noble. Apparently it was loud enough to echo up the chain of command and catch the ear of St. Martin’s Press. And so, fiction begot fact. Drawn from the private papers of articulate and creative men like Beethoven, Lord Byron, Mozart, and Flaubert, the publishers of St. Martin’s Press and the highly esteemed editor Ursula Doyle have produced a tome of love and longing inscribed for all time.

The classic wedding reading (St. Paul’s Letter to Corinthians) says:
Love is patient,
Love is kind and is not jealous;
Love does not brag and is not arrogant,
Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never fails.

“Love Letters of Great Men” begs to differ. There are letters to wives, letters to mistresses, letters to lovers from afar. Love is not only a wondrous, joyous, and beautiful emotion, but also one that is often filled with remorse, longing, and regret.

There are letters from Beethoven to his “Immortal Beloved,” a woman whose identity remains a mystery. Some theorize she was Antonie Brentano, a Vienesse woman married to one of Beethoven’s friends. Beethoven’s letters are searing and impassioned. They are filled with the torment Beethoven feels because he knows he can never fully be with his “beloved.”

But then there are the letters that depict the sweet, and undying devotion of Robert Browning to his beloved wife Elizabeth, and Mark Twain’s letter to his wife Livie on her 30th birthday. Henry VIII even muses on the absence of love.

The bottom line? Grab a copy and transport yourself to a more romantic time, because Bryon’s “I more than love you and cannot cease to love you” sure beats “i luv u.” Now, doesn’t it?

How fast can you get a copy?

Check out Amazon or Barnes & Noble or run to your nearest bookstore.  Then make a cup of tea, curl up, and enjoy.  Sigh.