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Edwina Preston, PhD Candidate, The University of Melbourne

Friday essay: a lament for the lost art of letter-writing – a radical art form reflecting 'the full catastrophe of life'

Suzy Hazelwood/Pexels, CC BY

Letters did not count [as writing]. A woman might write letters while sitting by her father’s sick-bed. She could write them by the fire while the men talked without disturbing them. The strange thing is, I thought, turning over the pages of Dorothy’s letters, what a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framing of a sentence, for the fashioning of a scene.

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

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