ABSTRACT
European women have been sending personal letters for centuries. Yet the nature of those letters, their style, the language they employed and their content, has changed beyond recognition. The correspondence of royal or religious women in the medieval period obeyed strict rules and was dependent on the authority of their rank. A letter was a special form of communication, used only in specific circumstances, and was carefully crafted. Its safe arrival was often uncertain. This was worlds away from the intimate and informal exchanges between friends and family members in the nineteenth century, often written with ease and at frequent intervals. Until quite recent times, letter-writing was largely restricted to small numbers of privileged women, and they were often conscious of engaging in an activity usually available only to men. By the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth century, not only were far larger numbers of women able to write letters, but they were seen as having a distinctive talent for doing so, which men could not emulate.
