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

woman.
Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings.
    On the 3rd day before the Ides of September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you come. Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send you greetings. I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, my dearest soul, as I hope you prosper and hail.
    BRITANNIA , vol. XVIII (1987)
THIS IS A VILE WORLD, DEAR SISTER
    Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s friendship with her sister sustained them both during travels and separations. Here she remembers their unhappy childhood and shares her misery. Her son Edward, fourteen, has just run away from Westminster School for the second time. He managed to reach Gibraltar and was not returned to his wretched mother until January 1728.
    September 1727
    This is a vile world, dear sister, and I can easily comprehend that whether one is at Paris or London one is stifled with a certain mixture of fool and knave that most people are composed of. I would have patience with a parcel of polite rascals or your downright honest fools. But father Adam shines through his whole progeny; he first ate the apple like a sot and then turned informer like a scoundrel. – So much for our inside. Then our outward is so liable to ugliness and distempers that we are perpetually plagued with feeling our own decays and seeing other people’s – yet six pennorth of common sense divided amongst a whole nation would make our lives roll away glib enough. But then we make laws and we follow customs; by the first we cut off our own pleasures, and by the second we are answerable for the faults and extravagancies of others. All these things and five hundred more convince me (as I have the most profound adoration for the Author of nature) that we are here in an actual state of punishment. I am satisfied I have been damned ever since I was born, and in submission to divine justice don’t at all doubt that I deserved it in some pre-existent state. I am very willing to soften the word damned and hope I am only in purgatory, and that after whining and grunting here a certain number of years I shall be translated to some more happy sphere where virtue will be natural and custom reasonable; that is, in short, where common sense will reign.
    I grow very devout, as you see, and place all my hopes in the next life, being totally persuaded of the nothingness of this. Don’t you remember how miserable we were in the little parlour at Thoresby? We thought marrying would put us at once into possession of all we wanted; then came being with child, etc., and you see what comes of being with child.
    Though after all I am still of opinion that ’tis extremely silly to submit to ill fortune; one should pluck up a spirit and live upon cordials when one can have no other nourishment. These are my present endeavours, and I run about though I have 5,000 pins and needles running into my heart. I try to console with a small damsel who is at present everything that I like, but alas, she is yet in a white frock. At fourteen she may run away with the butler. There’s one of the blessed consequences of great disappointment; you are not only hurt by the thing present, but it cuts off all future hopes and makes your very expectations melancholy. Quelle vie!
    ED. R. HALSBAND, THE COMPLETE LETTERS OF LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU (1965)
JANE AUSTEN TO HER SISTER CASSANDRA
    Jane Austen’s friendship with her sister Cassandra was so warm and harmonious that she could share most of her reactions. She wrote twice a week, sharing small happenings with a wit that reveals the novelist. In these extracts we feel the close bond with her sister, and her mocking at superficial concepts of friendship.
    Steventon: Tuesday Janry 8 [1799]
    My dear Cassandra
    You must read your letters over five times in future before you send them, and then,