Women letter writers

Women letter writers in early modern Europe created lengthy correspondences, where they expressed their intellect and their creativity; in the process, they also left a rich historical legacy.

Marie de Sévigné was the incarnation of this quality, to the point of becoming considered by many as the archetype of the woman letter writer, and an altogether literary author, even among her contemporaries, such as Suzanne Curchod: It is this precious collection that seems to flow into the reputation of all women: because it is always repeated, ever since Madame de Sévigné, that women write better than men and that they feel things more delicately than them.

For instance Nellie Weeton was born in Lancashire and she was poorly treated by her brother and husband.

She copied all the letters to her brother into journals and because some of these are extant they supply an insight into life in her time.

[1] The frontier between reality and fiction becomes blurry between literature and correspondence, above all when novelists turned this writing technique into a literary device that would become the epistolary novel, a genre that reached its peak during the Enlightenment when writers tried to persuade readers that between their hands was a real correspondence, which is what Jean-Jacques Rousseau more or less achieved with Julie, or the New Heloise.