800 Years of Women's Letters Read Online Free PDF

suffragettes, though even they had little success till after the First World War.
    The letter here from Millicent Fawcett, who campaigned for women’s suffrage, is a private one, showing her sense of perspective, tact and humour, despite setbacks. Women are allowed to reveal their sense of fun and wit far more publicly in the late twentieth century. One of my aims with these letters is to show that women always enjoyed humour, in areas where not repressed by patriarchal mores. Fay Weldon, one of whose semi-fictional letters to her niece is also included, commented to me that women were inhibited until very recently by the need not to displease the men on whom they were economically dependent. Weldon exemplifies the freedom of economically independent twentieth-century women to state what they really think about male behaviour. The extract here is ostensibly from a work of fiction, but used polemically to broadcast one of her feminist messages.
    As there is little from virtually silent majorities such as Muslim women, I have included a letter from an African epistolary novel. The author voices the stoicism necessary to ill-treated wives. The chapter ends on a completely new tone, a lesbian proud of her love, examining the potential of lesbian relationships. It is significant that these three letters were published in the early eighties. Three vastly different twentieth-century attitutdes to women’s predicaments are voiced, all skilful, all individual, yet preoccupied with the lot of other women and with working out strategies for survival – by wielding the pen.
‘YOUR SUPERIOR WISDOM’
    This letter is from Héloïse to her beloved Abelard, in twelfth-century Paris. Abelard was in the church, and it would have ruined his promising career if churchmen in power learned that he was having a passionate love affair. Here she claims she would rather be his ‘whore’ than his wife, in order to allow him to pursue his studies. Her selflessness was not rewarded, because her uncle, an ecclesiastic, put a cruel end to their love by castrating Abelard, and shutting her in a convent. She proved so able that she soon became Abbess .
    Twelfth Century
    Your superior wisdom knows better than our humble learning of the many serious treatises which the holy Fathers compiled for the instruction or exhortation or even the consolation of holy women, and of the care with which these were composed. And so in the precarious early days of our conversion long ago I was not a little surprised and troubled by your forgetfulness, when neither reverence for God nor our mutual love nor the example of the holy Fathers made you think of trying to comfort me, wavering and exhausted as I was by prolonged grief, either by word when I was with you or by letter when we had parted. Yet you must know that you are bound to me by an obligation which is all the greater for the further close tie of the marriage sacrament uniting us, and are the deeper in my debt because of the love I have always borne you, as everyone knows, a love which is beyond all bounds.
    You know, beloved, as the whole world knows, how much I have lost in you, how at one wretched stroke of fortune that supreme act of flagrant treachery robbed me of my very self in robbing me of you; and how my sorrow for my loss is nothing compared with what I feel for the manner in which I lost you. Surely the greater the cause for grief the greater the need for the help of consolation, and this no one can bring but you; you are the sole cause of my sorrow, and you alone can grant me the grace of consolation. You alone have the power to make me sad, to bring me happiness or comfort; you alone have so great a debt to repay me, particularly now when I have carried out all your orders so implicitly that I was powerless to oppose you in anything, I found strength at your command to destroy myself. I did more, strange to say – my love rose to such heights of madness that it robbed