Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms

“I would gladly write to you only by means of music, but I have things to say to you to-day which music could not express.”

When a friendship blossoms into love – the remarkable, tender love letters of classical music icons Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann:

Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964

Rachel Carson

“I feel such a joyous surge of wonder every time I stop to think how in such a dark time and when I least expected it, something so lovely and richly satisfying came into my life.”

Pioneering environmental scientist Rachel Carson’s almost unbearably touching farewell to her dearest friend and beloved – a beautiful ode to the heart’s unquantifiable, uncontainable dimensions:

Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson

Nigel Nicolson

How Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West fell in love—the true story behind “the longest and most charming love letter in literature” :

The Letters of Paul Cézanne

Alex Danchev

“Is it not a relief from suffering to be permitted to express it?”

Cézanne’s only known love letter:

Albert Einstein/Mileva Maric: The Love Letters

Albert Einstein

“How was I able to live alone before, my little everything? Without you I lack self-confidence, passion for work, and enjoyment of life — in short, without you, my life is no life.”

Einstein’s love letters:

Love Letters: 2,000 Years of Romance

“When one does not complain … one pays for outward calm with an almost unbearable inner struggle.”

Charlotte Brontë’s beautiful and heartbreaking love letters:

Love Letters Of Great Men

John C. Kirkland

“If people could see into my heart I should almost feel ashamed.”

Mozart’s magnificent love letter to his wife:

Letters to Véra

Vladimir Nabokov

“You are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought…”

Vladimir Nabokov’s passionate love letters to his wife and his affectionate bestiary of nicknames for her:

Violet to Vita : The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, 1910-1921

“All the hoardings of my imagination I have laid bare to you. There isn’t a recess in my brain into which you haven’t penetrated.”

The love letters of Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West, some of the most breathtaking use of the English language:

The Correspondence of Charles Darwin: Volume 9, 1861

Charles Darwin

“I feel in my inmost heart your admirable qualities & feelings & all I would hope is that you might direct them upwards.”

Emma Darwin’s beautiful love letter to Charles, 30 years and ten children into their marriage.

E. B. White on Dogs

E. B. White

For a wholehearted smile, E. B. White’s love letter to his young wife on the occasion of her pregnancy, “written” by their dog Daisy