Autobiographical fiction; England -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction; Teachers -- Fiction
I would rather write, and you can guess what kind of letter this is
when I say it is a fair copy: I have been making rough drafts all
the morning. When I talk I get angry, and also at times try to be
clever—two reasons why I fail to get attention paid to me. This is a
letter of the prudent sort. If it makes you break off the engagement,
its work is done. You are not a person who ought to marry at all. You
are unfitted in body: that we once discussed. You are also unfitted
in soul: you want and you need to like many people, and a man of that
sort ought not to marry. “You never were attached to that great sect”
who can like one person only, and if you try to enter it you will
find destruction. I have read in books and I cannot afford to despise
books, they are all that I have to go by—that men and women desire
different things. Man wants to love mankind; woman wants to love one
man. When she has him her work is over. She is the emissary of Nature,
and Nature’s bidding has been fulfilled. But man does not care a damn
for Nature—or at least only a very little damn. He cares for a hundred
things besides, and the more civilized he is the more he will care for
these other hundred things, and demand not only a wife and children,
but also friends, and work, and spiritual freedom.
I believe you to be extraordinarily civilized.—Yours ever,
S.A.
Shelthorpe, 9 Sawston Park Road, Sawston.
Dear Ansell,
But I’m in love—a detail you’ve forgotten. I can’t listen to English
Essays. The wretched Agnes may be an “emissary of Nature,” but I only
grinned when I read it. I may be extraordinarily civilized, but I
don’t feel so; I’m in love, and I’ve found a woman to love me, and I
mean to have the hundred other things as well. She wants me to have
them—friends and work, and spiritual freedom, and everything. You
and your books miss this, because your books are too sedate. Read
poetry—not only Shelley. Understand Beatrice, and Clara Middleton, and
Brunhilde in the first scene of Gotterdammerung. Understand Goethe when
he says “the eternal feminine leads us on,” and don’t write another
English Essay.—Yours ever affectionately,
R.E.
Cambridge.
Dear Rickie,
What am I to say? “Understand Xanthippe, and Mrs. Bennet, and Elsa in
the question scene of Lohengrin”? “Understand Euripides when he says
the eternal feminine leads us a pretty dance”? I shall say nothing of
the sort. The allusions in this English Essay shall not be literary. My
personal objections to Miss Pembroke are as follows:—(1) She is not
serious. (2) She is not truthful.
Shelthorpe, 9 Sawston Park Road,
Sawston.
My Dear Stewart,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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