This collection, or selection, begins in Tudor times and ends in 1985 with a letter from Philip Larkin to Kingsley Amis' - a sad and valedictory one, since Larkin was already, dying. Sir Thomas More, awaiting execution, writes in farewell to his daughter Margaret; Queen Elizabeth writes imperiously but suavely to her fellow sovereign (and ultimately her successor), James of Scotland, about his troublesome mother, Mary; Charles I confides in his favourite the Duke of Buckingham about friction between him and his young French wife, Henrietta Maria. All the great 18th century letter writers are here, including Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Horace Walpole, Dr Johnson and his inevitable Boswell, Gilbert White the clergyman and naturalist, Fanny Burney. Maria Edgeworth's letters are, in general, more interesting than her novels; Jane Austen's correspondence style is unremarkable, mainly chatty reports of local balls and doings in her own county" world. Byron, Keats and Mary Shelley are all present, and there is an unusually sincere and heartfelt note from Leigh Hunt to the painter Severn, Keats's companion in his last days at Rome:
Whether your friend dies or not, it will not be among, the least lofty of your recollections by and by that you helped to smooth the sick bed of so fine a being." Emerson and Thoreau represent 19th century America, but there are also some examples of Emily Dickinson's very strange, "inspirational" epistolary style, at once anachronistic and forward looking (she would have been quite at home in the 1960s). John Addington Symons, the Italophile writer, gives an entertaining description of a dinner party at which Gladstone and Tennyson were the chief guests: "Tennyson all the while kept drinking glasses of port. & glowering round the room through his spectacles . . . Gladstone is in some sort a man of the world, Tennyson a child & treated by him like a child." W.B. Yeats and his father (a great letter writer), Wilde, Shaw, Joyce add up to a solid Irish contingent. Among the recent American writers included, Edmund Wilson is probably the most entertaining and is also totally at home in the genre. Two of the most vivid correspondents are the Victorians Wilkie Collins and Edward Lear, both of whom illustrate their letters with lively drawings.