ABSTRACT
It is their intimacy that characterises women’s letters in the nineteenth century. This chapter will discuss the meaning of intimacy in these letters and the new technologies that made it possible by enabling women to write their own letters and pay for them to be sent by post, assured that they would be read only by the addressee. Included here are letters to husbands, children, siblings, friends and lovers, showing how the range of women’s letters expanded across the nineteenth century, and how letters enabled women to express their feelings and to negotiate relationships in new ways. The chapter also discusses the letters that show greater continuity with the past, especially immigrant letters, often written to a family as a whole at irregular intervals.
