Three years apart in age, Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower were both formed as writers by the fact of being Australian-born women.
A March 1593 letter from England’s Queen Elizabeth I to King James VI of Scotland, where she acknowledges his “cumber [i.e., trouble] to read such scribbed lines.”
(Folger Shakespeare Library)
While the rise of smartphones and typing impacts handwriting, bad penmanship is far from a new phenomenon. People have struggled to read each other’s handwriting for centuries.
Creating the alphabet took thousands of years.
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Hundreds of Australians wrote to Jackie Kennedy after her husband was killed. The letters paint a revealing portrait of who we were and who we wanted to be.
André Dao has kept the legacy of his grandparents alive in Anam, a brilliant novel of immense scope that became a full quest for the truth of his family history, which spans the two Vietnam Wars.
A letter from van Gogh to his brother Theo featuring a sketch for his painting The Sower.
Van Gogh Museum
Edwina Preston pays tribute to the humble letter: from literary love letters to philosophical lessons to cherished family heirlooms. Letters impart lessons, reveal character – and are a form of art.
Kate Grenville suggests we read Elizabeth Macarthur’s letters as ‘a wonderful piece of fiction, sustained over sixty years’. They were exercises in doubleness, concealment, and delicious irony.
Alexander Ermochenko / Reuters / Alamy stock photo
Two poems that were originally excised from ‘Ariel,’ Plath’s seminal poetry collection, vividly channel the painful experience of losing an unborn child.
A painting for the U.S. Army’s Stars and Stripes newspaper shows a downed pilot fending off sharks with a knife.
Ed Vebell/Getty Images
As part of the nation’s massive wartime mobilization effort, millions of Americans, for the first time, traveled abroad – where many had their first encounters with the marine predators.
Dickens worried for the safety of his sons when diphtheria broke out in France and - in a newly discovered letter - wrote about how the truth was difficult to find.
‘The Dyings have been too deep for me,’ Dickinson wrote in 1884.
Wikimedia Commons
While the man the world knows as ‘Papa’ balanced the demands of parenting with his work, his letters and fiction offer a window into the depth of his paternal feeling.