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Voices from the Dead Letter Office
On the epistolary life
In another era, in a different society, the writer, Madame de Sévigné, might have been a novelist or an essayist, so attentive was she to mores and hairdos and human nature, illness and fashion and politics, gossip and feasting and folly—but it was her daughter, Françoise-Marguerite, to whom her most confidential emotions were nakedly addressed. Charles Eliot Norton, a Boston Brahmin and all-round savant residing in London, translator of Dante, professor of art history at Harvard, and in all other ways the sum of advanced Western civilization as defined by the Victorian elite, wrote to an American friend in 1869: And again: “As healthy, sane human beings we must love and hate—love what is good for mankind, and hate what is evil for mankind.” But as her novels reveal, straightforward rationalist Victorian rectitude of this kind covers over an underworld of shame and indignity, where ignorance, deceit, envy, avarice, foolishness, failure, and spite live on; where the child Dickens is maltreated, where Oscar Wilde suffers, where Mrs. Lewes herself endures shunning, all in the name of the high-minded teacherly credo that her letters proclaim.
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