‘You, with all your undumb letters’ – A Study in Sapphic Love

suggestion for background music while reading: lonely bones by dodie

Sappho and Erinna in a Garden Mytilene - Simeon Solomon, 1864

A 1892 poem by Lord Alfred ‘Boise’ Douglas, which was quoted to convict his notorious ‘close friend’ Oscar Wilde for gross indecency,  ends with the phrase ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. A hundred and thirty years later, Rachel Smith and Barbara Vesey would publish a compilation of letters of LGBTQ+ love & friendship through history under the semantically same, but thematically defiant title, ‘The Love That Dares’. 

Letter writing for women and for queer individuals, and for queer women, particularly, has historically been one of the foremost forms of rebellion. As Kay Turner’s Between Us: A legacy of Lesbian Love Letters phrases it, ‘Long before the first button, poster, pamphlet, or book made claims for our liberation, the lesbian love letter cried out: I love you, no matter what the world thinks.’ For the lesbian lover, letters have been a sheer necessity; a lived self-expression of transgressive love. Quiet and private in the moment, but resonant and loud in the pages of history. 

Anne Carson’s Eros mentions an ancient riddle attributed to Sappho: "What creature is it that is female in nature and hides in its womb unborn children who, although  they are voiceless, speak to people far away?" Sappho, answering her own riddle says: "The female creature is a letter. The unborn children are the letters [of the alphabet] it carries. And the letters, although they have no voices, speak to people far away, whomever they wish..."  

This intrinsic link that Sappho draws between women and letters helps us frame lesbian letter-writing within the larger context of women's correspondence, which in turn is linked to the constraints of patriarchy. Letter-writing has for centuries been trivialised as a "woman's art." But this very trivialization led to the creation of a subversive genre. Letter-writing (and later epistolary novels) became a site of self-invention for women; on the page, they expressed a version of the self in excess of what was considered appropriately "female" in a male world (Turner 15). Letters were hence women’s first claim to privacy, a word whose weight and centrality to love can perhaps only be understood fully by queer persons.

If love is the human heart’s highest capacity, then letters are its purest manifestation. What follows is a celebration of that same endless and endlessly beautiful capacity through a study of letters exchanged between sapphics, or as Woolf would call them, ‘those whose imaginations are stirred by women alone’ (the author of this blog chose to strike the last word in respect for inclusivity).

Virginia Woolf & Vita Sackville-West

The love affair between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West– the gender-bending protagonist of Virginia’s Orlando, which Vita’s son, Nigel Nicolson, has described as “the longest and most charming love-letter in literature” – has been rigorously documented in compilations like Alison Bechdel’s Love Letters: Vita and Virginia.

Letter from Virginia, 20 March 1928

“ORLANDO IS FINISHED!!! Did you feel a sort of tug, as if your neck was being broken on Saturday last at 5 minutes to one?... I’ve lived in you all these months — coming out, what are you really like? Do you exist? Have I made you up?”

Vita signs off her response to this letter with a cheeky–

‘your adoring and perfectly solid, 

Orlando’

It is in part this wit that often makes Vita Sackville-West's letters more enchanting than even her infamous lover’s. For instance;

From Vita to Virginia, 6 January 1928

Was your telegram intended to convey a command or merely a message? I mean, should it be written ‘Love Virginia!’ – an imperative, – or ‘Love. Virginia.’? Whichever way you read it, it was very nice and unexpected, and if a command it has been obeyed.

From Vita to Virginia, 18 August 1933

Dear Mrs Woolf,

(That appears to be the suitable formula.)

I regret that you have been in bed, though not with me – (a less suitable formula).

Dated 21 January 1926, Vita writes to Virginia (or Potto as she affectionately calls her), arguably one of the greatest love letters ever written: 

‘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 undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase. Perhaps, you wouldn’t even feel it…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 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 defenses. And I don’t really resent it.’

From Virginia to Vita (who was staying in Tehran at the time), 5 February 1927

‘It gets worse steadily – your being away. All the sleeping draughts and irritants have worn off, and I’m settling down to wanting you, doggedly, dismally, faithfully – I hope that pleases you. It’s damned unpleasant for me. I can assure you.’

For all their exquisite letters that have been quoted exhaustively, the true testament to Vita and Virginia’s love for each other can be found in their simpler sentences. For instance; 

From Vita to Virginia (from Tehran), 8 April 1926

‘How pleased I shall be to sit on your floor again.’

From Virginia to Vita (on the subject of lunch at Knole – Vita’s residence), 8 December 1926

‘Please come and bathe me in serenity again’

Emily Dickinson and Susan Gilbert

Susan Gilbert entered Emily Dickinson’s life in the summer of 1850 (“when love first began, on the step at the front door, and under the Evergreens”) when both she and her brother, Austin, were taken with her androgynous beauty. Emily and Susan’s (or Sue or Susie, as her lover would address her) relationship involved long walks in the woods, exchanging books and poetry (and perhaps physical intimacy, as months later Dickinson will write, anticipating her beloved’s return: ‘Susie, will you indeed come home next Saturday, and be my own again, and kiss me as you used to?’). 

Some of the most intense, intimate correspondence between the two belongs to the period when Susan was working as a math teacher in Baltimore. For instance, ‘And I do love to run fast — and hide away from them all; here in dear Susie’s bosom, I know is love and rest’ written two months before her return and ‘I need you more and more, and the great world grows wider… every day you stay away — I miss my biggest heart; my own goes wandering round, and calls for Susie’ three weeks prior. 

In the same year, 1852, once upon returning from church, Emily Dickinson writes to her beloved: 

‘When he said 'Our Heavenly Father,' I said 'Oh Darling Sue'; when he read the 100th Psalm, I kept saying your precious letter all over to myself, and Susie, when they sang…I made up words and kept singing how I loved you, and you had gone, while all the rest of the choir were singing Hallelujahs.’ 

Another such ‘blasphemous’ evocation of god was documented in the letters of;

Jeannette Marks and Mary Woolley

Mary Woolley, a Biblical scholar by academic training, writing to her beloved Jeannette Marks, rephrases the Old Testament, 2 Samuel 1:26, recording David’s words for Jonathan, "Thy love to me was (original: is) wonderful, passing the love of women (original: men)". 

Lillian Faderman titles her book ‘Surpassing The Love of Men’, documenting the romantic friendship and love between women from the Renaissance to the present, along similar lines. 

Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler

Amongst the many, many loves Faderman’s text documents is the great "success story" of romantic friendship is that of Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, "the Ladies of Llangollen." Sarah and Eleanor were two upper-class Irishwomen who managed to run off together (once in men’s clothes but were caught by their families and again a second time when finally their relatives were convinced that nothing would change their minds, and they let the two women be) and share thereafter, every waking and sleeping moment, just as countless women prayed in their letters.  In 1778, Sarah and Eleanor, both of wealthy, titled families, eloped. William Wordsworth, who was a friend to them, wrote “Sisters of love, a love allowed to climb Ev'n on this earth, above the reach of time” of them. Anna Seward, another esteemed poet, wrote enough verses about the ‘Davidean friendship’ (cf. David and Jonathan) of the two women to fill a small volume. 

Mme de Stael and Mme Recamier 

The 19th-century correspondence between Mme de Stael and Mme Recamier is filled with ecstatic claims. Repeatedly, de Stael wrote to her confidante, "I love you with a love surpassing friendship." And in a letter of 1809, she summarised the political urgency binding their relationship, saying, "You have made me know all that is really sweet about love for a woman —it is the alliance of two weak creatures who face their oppressors together." (Turner 16)

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and journalist Lorena Hickok

In the summer of 1928, Roosevelt met journalist Lorena Hickok, whom she would address as ‘Hick’ in all their correspondence. The thirty-year relationship that ensued has remained the subject of much speculation and has been documented in Rodger Streitmatter’s Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters Of Eleanor Roosevelt And Lorena Hickok (Popova). 

On March 5, 1933, the first evening of FDR’s inauguration, Roosevelt writes to  Hick:

‘Hick my dearest–

I cannot go to bed tonight without a word to you. I felt a little as though a part of me was leaving tonight. You have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without you.’

That evening also remains the first time the First Lady was seen wearing a sapphire ring Hickok had given her, of which she writes only two days later: ‘Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it & think: she does love me, or I wouldn’t be wearing it.’

Then, from Hickock to Roosevelt, December 1933:

‘I’ve been trying to bring back your face — to remember just how you look. Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips.’

Letters of longing and love are as central to the sapphic experience today as they were to, perhaps, Sappho herself. There are countless other women whose love for each other has been immortalised in the letter. Although, due to the shortness of time and the limitation of a word count, they could not be given place here, all readers are highly encouraged to explore the letters exchanged between Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Edith Wynn Matthison, Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä, and Mrs Elizabeth Carter and Mrs Montagu, in addition to the further readings.

Written by Tiya Bansal, 2nd Year, English Hons

Bibliography: 

1. Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. William Morrow and Company, 1981.

2. Dickinson, Emily. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward, 3 vols., Harvard University Press, 1958.

3. Turner, Kay, and Sheri Tornatore. Between Us: A Legacy of Lesbian Love Letters. Chronicle Books (CA), 1996. (a must-read for anyone interested in lived sapphic history, as it documents not only letters exchanged between historical figures but also ‘the letterworks of the common lesbian, the ordinary women nurses, teachers, soldiers, housekeepers, waitresses, computer programmers, and copy-editors’.)

4. Sackville-West, Vita, and Virginia Woolf. Love Letters: Vita and Virginia. National Geographic Books, 2022.

5. Smith, Rachel, and Barbara Vesey. The Love That Dares: Letters of LGBTQ+ Love and Friendship Through History. Ilex Press, 2022.

6. Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. Princeton UP, 2023.

7. Popova, Maria. “Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert.” The Marginalian, 1 June 2022, www.themarginalian.org/2018/12/10/emily-dickinson-love-letters-susan-gilbert.

8. Popova, Maria. “Eleanor Roosevelt’s Controversial Love Letters to Lorena Hickok.” The Marginalian, 9 Nov. 2016, www.themarginalian.org/2012/10/11/eleanor-roosevelt-lorena-hickok-love-letters.

9. Streitmatter, Roger. Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters Of Eleanor Roosevelt And Lorena Hickok. Simon and Schuster, 1999.

Further Reading: 

1. Levaillant, Maurice. The Passionate Exiles: Madame de Staël and Madame Ucamier. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958.

2. Carson, Rachel. Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952–1964. Edited by Martha Freeman, Beacon Press, 1995.

3. Carter, Elizabeth. Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Montagu Between the Years 1755–1800. Edited by Montagu Pennington, 3 vols., E. C. and J. Rivington, 1817.

4. Norton, Rictor. My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters Through the Centuries. 1998.

5. Usukawa, Saeko. The Little Lavender Book on the Love That Once Dared Not Speak Its Name. 1994.

6. Gordon, Mary Louisa. Chase of the Wild Goose: The Story of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, Known as the Ladies of Llangollen. Hogarth Press, 1936

7. Dhall, Pawan. “Letters as Building Blocks of India’s Queer Movements | Varta Trust.” Varta Trust, 7 Jan. 2025, vartagensex.org/2021/08/31/letters-as-building-blocks-of-indias-queer-movements.