famous love letters throughout lit history

a craft reserved for real lovers

there is nothing more romantic than a handwritten letter. while i’m getting back in the routine of writing regularly (1 free post & 1 paid post a week or i delete this substack), i want to share some of my favorite love letters by writers from my personal archive. it’s true what they say: if you're with an artist and you aren’t the subject of their craft, they don’t love you enough. i once wrote a letter to the poet richard siken and if you ask real nice, i’ll tell you what he wrote back.

letter to rita hayworth from orson welles

dearest angel girl:

… i suppose most of us are lonely in this big world, but we must fall tremendously in love to find it out. the cure is the discovery of our need for company — i mean company in the very special sense we’ve come to understand since we happened to each other — you and i. the pleasures of human experience are emptied away without that companionship — now that i’ve known it; without it joy is just an unendurable as sorrow. you are my life — my very life. never imagine your hope approximates what you are to me. beautiful, precious little baby — hurry up the sun! — make the days shorter till we meet. i love you, that’s all there is to it.

your boy,
orson

letter to june carter from johnny cash

happy birthday princess,

we get old and get used to each other. we think alike. we read each others minds. we know what the other wants without asking. sometimes we irritate each other a little bit. maybe sometimes take each other for granted.

but once in awhile, like today, i meditate on it and realize how lucky i am to share my life with the greatest woman i ever met. you still fascinate and inspire me. you influence me for the better. you’re the object of my desire, the #1 earthly reason for my existence. i love you very much.

happy birthday princess.
john

letter to virginia woolf from vita sackville-west

i am reduced to a thing that wants virginia. i composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: i just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. you, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. and yet i believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. but you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. whereas with me it is quite stark: i miss you even more than i could have believed; and i was prepared to miss you a good deal. so this letter is just really a squeal of pain. it is incredible how essential to me you have become. i suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. damn you, spoilt creature; i shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this—but oh my dear, i can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: i love you too much for that. too truly. you have no idea how stand-offish i can be with people i don’t love. i have brought it to a fine art. but you have broken down my defences. and i don’t really resent it …

please forgive me for writing such a miserable letter.

v.

letter to vera nabokov from vladimir nabokov

my tenderness, my happiness, what words can i write for you? how strange that although my life’s work is moving a pen over paper, i don’t know how to tell you how i love, how i desire you. such agitation — and such divine peace: melting clouds immersed in sunshine — mounds of happiness. and i am floating with you, in you, aflame and melting — and a whole life with you is like the movement of clouds, their airy, quiet falls, their lightness and smoothness, and the heavenly variety of outline and tint — my inexplicable love. i cannot express these cirrus-cumulus sensations.

letter to alexa chung from alex turner

my mouth hasn't shut up about you since you kissed it. the idea that you may kiss it again is stuck in my brain, which hasn't stopped thinking about you since, well, before any kiss. and now the prospect of those kisses seems to wind me like when you slip on the stairs and one of the steps hits you in the middle of the back. the notion of them continuing for what is traditionally terrifying forever excites me to an unfamiliar degree.