Englishwoman's Love-Letters, An,
Laurence Housman, 1900, John Murray.This bestseller was at first published anonymously. ‘It need hardly be said,’ begins the preface to the first edition, ‘that the woman by whom these letters were written had no thought that they would be read by any one but the person to whom they were addressed.’ Housman's achievement was to maintain the note of disingenuousness for a further 300 pages. ‘It is you who make me think so much about myself, trying to find myself out,’ the heroine writes in her second letter to an unnamed lover. ‘I used to be more self-possessed, and regarded it as the crowning virtue: and now—your possession of me sweeps it away, and I stand crying to be let into a secret that is no longer mine. Shall I ever know ... ...
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