Free 800 Years of Women's Letters by Olga Kenyon Page A

little extant correspondence between friends until the time of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when she, her sister Lady Mar, and fellow writers shared their ideas and feelings on a range of personal and public issues. A group of wealthy eighteenth-century intellectuals, named bluestockings by Dr Johnson, displayed both political commitment and the ability to work together on many philosophical, social and governmental issues. Women in the nineteenth century continued this tradition of collaboration.
    Friendship provided a rampart against solitude and incomprehsnsion and against the social indignities which many spinsters were forced to undergo. Friendships between sisters proved vitally supportive, as did correspondence between writers, often isolated or underappreciated. Fanny Burney was delighted to meet Madame de Staël in 1792, as Virginia Woolf was to meet Vita Sackville-West in 1926. (However, with her novelist’s honesty, Woolf realized that envy slightly undermined her response to Katherine Mansfield.)
    The second part of this section deals with ‘romantic friendship’ a more evocative term than lesbian to describe close, loving, possibly sexual relationships between women. I concentrate on the emotional and intellectual sharing and caring of the Ladies of Llangollen at the end of the eighteenth century, and also letters between Sackville-West and Woolf in the twentieth century. Compare these with the extracts from the significantly named Between Friends by Gillian Hanscombe in the previous chapter.
    The third part concentrates on women’s friendships with men. First George Sand, as she was skilful in maintaining emotional and intellectual relationships with a wide circle of men, often helping them, as with her advice to Flaubert in his old age (see Chapter Ten). Her powers of analysis are used to indicate where the strenths of friendship lie. In this century Anaïs Nin was supportive emotionally, and often financially. Marina Tsvetayeva and Boris Pasternak both needed their correspondence in order to share poetic ideas. This section represents the multifaceted aspects of female friendship.
THE FIRST FEMALE LETTER IN ROMAN BRITAIN CELEBRATES WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIP
    The earliest letter written by a woman on British soil dates from 170, the first century AD . It was written in Latin, on a writing-tablet in the recently excavated area of Vindolanda. The ink is unusually well preserved, so that the writing is still clear.
    The tablet contains a letter to Sulpicia Lepidina (the name appears in full on the back) from a Claudia Severa. In her letter Severa sends Lepidina a warm invitation to visit her for her (Severa’s) birthday. We can confidently deduce that Lepidina was the wife of Flavius Cerialis, prefect of one of the cohorts at the fort on Vindolanda. She then adds greetings from ‘Aelius Meus’, who must have been her husband. In one of the other letters found in 1985 Severa is again the writer and in this letter she refers to a certain Brocchus in such a way that there can be no doubt that she means her husband; his full name, therefore, was Aelius Brocchus. We cannot locate his station or specify his rank, but we can be sure that he was a commander of another unit, presumably in north Britain.
    The discovery of this tablet and of others with evidence concerning officers’ wives and families is of major importance, showing conditions in north Britain at this period, so soon after the conquest of the area. Equally important is the palaeographical evidence which the tablet presents. The body of the letter is written in an elegant script, the work of a professional writer. The second hand is noticeably less elegant, indeed it may fairly be described as somewhat clumsy in appearance. It is quite certain that the writer is Severa herself, adding a brief message and the closing greeting in her own hand. Almost certainly therefore, this is the earliest known example of writing in Latin by a