Hell Hath No Fury: Women's Letters from the End of the Affair

Description

From Publishers Weekly
Whether a two-line note, a brief e-mail, an expansive retelling of a romance or a lamenting farewell, each letter in journalist Holmes's first book offers a snapshot from the end of an affair. With anger, sorrow, wit, intelligence and whining, such authors as Sylvia Plath, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anne Boleyn, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf and countless lesser-known women analyze what went wrong, say good-bye and address the future, some more happily than others, some impulsively and others with great forethought. Chapters group similar letters (the "tell off," the "just friends," the "marriage refusal," the "unsent letter," etc.), mixing contemporary and historical compositions, so that Monica Lewinsky's 1997 e-mail to President Bill Clinton follows Aline Bernstein's 1930s' correspondence with Thomas Wolfe in the "silent treatment" chapter, and the letter from a young woman named Lois to serviceman Harry Leister during WWII follows Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann's 1942 missive to film producer Irving Mansfield in the "Dear John" chapter. Holmes's comprehensive collection includes letters from epistolary and narrative novels beginning with Ovid's Heroides; prescriptive letters culled from letter-writing manuals; and unsent letters from as recently as October 2001. The careful reader will appreciate the subtle differences between many of the letters, but will have to plow through a quantity of less interesting work before happening on a gem. Many of the letters cannot stand on their own and beg for greater context and additional details about the author and the relationship. Still, literary romantics will have fun thumbing through this unique assemblage of send-off notes.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal
Motivated by her own disappointing relationship and the responses she received to the "breakup" letter she sent to her lover and to ten other people on the Internet, freelance writer Holmes compiled this anthology of 356 real or fictional letters of love, hatred, anger, disappointment, disgust, and rejection written by women when relationships with their lovers, suitors, or husbands went awry. The collection offers sent and unsent letters between various notables, including Anne Boleyn to Henry VIII, Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay, Princess Margaret to Robin Douglas-Home, Jacqueline Susann to Irvin Mansfield, and Monica Lewinsky to Bill Clinton, as well as those between unknown individuals, those published as literature (e.g., The Letters of Abelard and Heloise), and those published in letter-writing manuals. The anthology is divided into 13 sections, each chronologically arranged, according to types, such as "Marriage Refusal," "Prescriptive Letters," "Goodbye Letter," "Tell-Off," "Dear John," and "Divorce Letter." This book will be consoling to those who discover the universality of experiences and emotions, depressing to those who find the collection an overwhelming overdose of reactions to unfulfilled relationships, and inspiring to those motivated to pursue the relationships of notables mentioned or to study letters as literature. Appropriate for public and academic libraries.
Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, NJ
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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