Given my love of reading letters, it should surprise none of my readers to know that I picked up The Letters of Abelard and Heloise for my reading enjoyment. I bought it used for 75¢. Good thing, too, given how the book turned out.

I had never heard of these two. Peter Abelard, b. around 1079, was a French philosopher. Schooled in the liberal arts, he fell in love with Heloise. She was from Paris. Somehow they met and had an intimate relationship. Surviving letters suggest he wanted to marry her, but she refused. Believing that marriage amounted to legal slavery or the wife, or that the wife was essentially nothing more than a gold digger, she wrote to Abelard:

God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would be dearer and more honourable to me to be called not his Empress but your whore.

That’s quite a statement to put in print, but that’s how she felt. His reward for her being his mistress was castration by a mob employed by her uncle. Before that, they had a child together. After his mutilation, he became a monk and she a nun. For the rest of their lives they lived apart. Abelard established a convent and put Heloise in charge of it. They rarely met after their going into religious orders, but exchanged a number of letters. These have been passed down to us.

My copy of this book, a Penguin Classic, includes a lengthy introduction, which was good to read, but was about twice as long as I would have liked.  Before the letters was an item Abelard wrote about his trials and tribulations. That item wore me out. The English translation from the original Latin was okay, but I didn’t find the story engaging.

Then I got to the letters. One from Heloise was first, the one with the quote above. Abelard responded, the Heloise to him—all long letters—and by that time my mind couldn’t take any more of it. I rarely give up on a book, but I did this one. I quit on page 139 of 295.

I’m not going to hang onto this book in hopes I’ll read it in the future. I have too many books, and too few years left, to keep reading books that don’t hold my interest. 2-stars for this one.

It’s difficult to remember where I picked up different books. Before embarking on this road trip, I searched my bookshelves for a book to take to read, something that looked interesting but was probably not a keeper. In the basement, in the area where we set up a bed for when needed when we have lots of company, I found a book titled The Hogarth Letters. I had no idea what it was about, when I got it, how new or old it was, but it sounded perfect. Upstairs and into my book bag it went.

It turned out to be something much different than I expected. I love reading letters (as regular readers of this blog will know), but it turned out this book wasn’t really letters. This was a publisher’s (Hogarth Publishing) stunt from the early 1930s. Twelve different people—writers, politicians, etc.—wrote fictitious letters to people. Not necessarily real people. What the “letters” were were essays disguised as letters. The subjects were of the authors’ own choosing, and the person behind the stunt—er, project, Hermione Lee, did an introduction.

Essays from Great Britain from the early 1930s. The Great Depression was on world-wide, or coming on. It was the time between the two world wars. Communism was on the rise. Some of the essays, such as the one by Viscount Cecil, dealt with disarmament. I read that one through and learned from it, though many of the references and circumstances were obscure in 2023. Still, it wasn’t bad. A couple of other letters/essays were to real people, such as Madan Blanchard, Virginia Wolfe, and W.B. Yeats, the poet. Others were to a fictitious person representing a class, such as an archbishop, a modern novelist, a young poet, a grandfather.

I began this book at the beginning, even though a book such as this could be read at any of the essays that seemed, from the title, most interesting. I read the first couple all the way through, but then I found them increasingly uninteresting. I started reading them, found myself skipping or just reading the first sentence in each paragraph. The last three or four essays I quit after getting halfway into them and finding myself not benefitting from the reading.

I plan on abandoning this book, but not quite yet. As I write this, I’m halfway into the letter to W.B. Yeats. I may finish it. I have six more essays to go, and I will at least start each of them and perhaps finish a couple.

Originally published in 1931 (my copy re-published in 1986), I can’t recommend this book. Perhaps I’ll feel differently if the last six letters/essays are better than the ones I’ve read. If I leave a rating somewhere, it will be 2-stars. Maybe they seemed interesting at that time, but almost 90 years later, not so much.

Nor is it a keeper. When we get home, it will go straight to the donation pile. And it goes into the category of, “Where did I get this book (for $3.00, apparently), and why did I think I needed it?”

I had planned to write a post today about the pastoral change our church is going through, but I think I’m going to wait until Friday for that. So here’s a book review, of the book The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I first read this during the early 2000s, having found it on Project Gutenberg, downloaded both volumes, formatted them for a good mix of easy reading and concise printing, and printed them. I read them rather quickly, my second foray into the world of letter collections after the letters of Charles Lamb. Recently I learned that you can upload a Word file to Kindle. I did so with these two volumes and read them again on my phone.

At that time, Carlyle I was just beginning to know, and Emerson was a total mystery to me. Neither man had been part of the curriculum in my school years, and my adult reading up to that point had been in different directions. Why I happened upon these volumes, why I downloaded and formatted them, and why I shoved other reading aside for them are all mysteries to me.

But read them I did, and loved them. These two literary giants, from opposite sides of the Atlantic, both influential in their milieu, both men who enjoyed friendship. Carlyle was probably the more brusque of the two, Emerson the more gentle. They divided over politics, including the question of slavery. Hard to believe in this day, but Carlyle was pro-slavery, and this became a wedge between them.

Yet the friendship endured. Emerson, who had both inherited ad married into money in America, took note of Carlyle’s poverty and became his promoter in the New World, where he thought Carlyle would find an audience. He found publishers and negotiated deals favorable to Carlyle. Soon, dollars were sent eastward to be converted into pounds, and Carlye could soon say he was not poor any more. Implied was he was now free to write what he wanted rather than to write for money.

The friends met during Emerson’s three trips to Europe. The first time, in 1833, Emerson (who was totally unknown to Carlyle) sought out Carlyle, whose magazine articles Emerson had taken special note of. They had a 24-hour visit before Emerson left for the return voyage. But the conversation was stimulating. Eight months later, Emeron wrote to Carlyle, and the forty years of letters commenced.

The letters are rich in the words of friendship. They discussed their writings, their homes, their families, their lives. At one point, Emerson pulled back from immediately returning Carlyle’s letters, at least in part due to the rift over politics. The correspondence never ended, but it tapered off. The first twenty years include at least twice the number of letters than the last twenty.

The Emerson quote I include on my website comes from one of his letters to Carlyle. In this, my second reading of the letters, I found great enjoyment. I suspect someday I will read them again.