ABSTRACT
This chapter has two main purposes; to explore Elizabeth and John Shaw's experiences of and approaches to letter-writing, encompassing their varied experiences as male and female subjects, and to consider how their letters can be used as a source for writing history. During the eighteenth-century there emerged a strong cultural belief that letter-writing was a peculiarly feminine art. Letter-writing was for them an act of love and devotion. They came of age, and to their own experience of correspondence, towards the end of what is now sometimes seen as a golden age for letter-writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries, a time that witnessed a deluge of letter-writing manuals and produced some of the greatest epistolary collections and epistolary novels. The written word was but a poor substitute for the other's immediate presence, for facial expressions, the language of bodies and eyes, and of the spoken word back and forth in the give and take of conversation.
