LOVE LETTERS

'I'm madly eager to see you again. My heart goes knocking when I think of it.' - Rupert Brooke to Cathleen Nesbitt 1913. The visionary theatre director Joan Littlewood in the late 1930s met Gerry Raffles when he joined Theatre Union. Joan was married and eight years his senior, but they fell deeply in love and became lifelong partners. In a letter he wrote to her 1st November 1948 he writes: 'You are necessary to me not just for happiness of peace, but for life itself.' For each letter there is a facsimile reproduction in colour, this one with green ink on The Dorchester Hotel headed paper with a note across the top SEVEN DAYS TO GO. Love letters from 168BC, Marjory Brews to John Paston 3rd February 1477, Prince Arthur to Katherine of Aragon 5th October 1499, love notes between Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII, the Earl of Essex to Elizabeth I, husbands to wives, Nelson to Lady Emma Hamilton, Dickens to Catherine Hogarth, Charlotte Brontë to Professor Constantin Héger, Christina Rossetti to James Morris, Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, Mervyn Peake to his wife and Ted Hughes to Sylvia Plath around 1980: 'Cambridge was our courtship' from the exceptional collection of manuscripts relating to the volume The Birthday Letters. These poems are written in an open, tender, conversational language that addresses Plath directly. The poem is reproduced together with a beautiful glorious photograph from the time and throughout the extracts from these extraordinary intimate correspondence between famous lovers are reproductions and facsimile images of the letters. 30 in total, 144pp, illus.