67 Books Like Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott

Ernestine Rose, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who was one of the first women to speak out for women’s rights in the United States, was well-known in her time but is little remembered today.

This book, which includes most of her published speeches and some of her letters, made her come alive for me. With lines like “It is time to consider whether what is wrong in one sex, can be right in the other” (referring to the double standard of sexual morality for men and women), it still holds relevance for us today. I’ll never get to hear Ernestine Rose speak in person, so this is the next best thing.

Before I stumbled across this book, I had never heard of Caroline Healey Dall, a prickly but vulnerable and fiercely intelligent Bostonian who knew almost everyone in the various reform movements that swept across the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.

On one day, Dall is recording the details of a pregnancy that went horribly wrong; on another, passing along salacious gossip about a lady who propositioned Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May). All the while, she champions the cause of women’s rights while clashing with some of the many strong personalities in the movement.

In 1853, hardware store owner Henry Blackwell proposed marriage to a woman he barely knew: Lucy Stone, who had become prominent as a speaker for the abolitionist and women’s rights movements. Not surprisingly, Lucy refused, but she allowed her younger suitor to write to her, and this collection of letters, spanning the idealistic pair’s courtship and eventual marriage, is the result.

I found it to be a moving portrait of a couple falling in love and managing to stay in love despite the usual ups and downs of wedlock and their quite different personalities. And did you know that Lucy was one of the first American women to keep her own surname upon marriage?

What list of nineteenth-century feminists would be complete without the movement’s grand dames, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton? This book, the first of a six-volume series, takes us to the early days of their friendship and alliance. Not only is this collection a testimony to the enormous amount of energy and organization expended by these two reformers, but it also reminds us of their human side.

Some of my favorite moments include Stanton bragging about the birth of her first daughter (and fifth child): “I laid on a lounge about 15 minutes, and alone with my nurse & one female friend, brought forth this noble girl,” and Anthony grumbling about her decision to give up the “Bloomer” outfit adopted by a number of women reformers, “I have let down some of my dresses and am dragging around with long skirts.”

Elisabeth Elliot considered Katherine Mansfield not only a literary role model, but a person with whom she had so much in common that reading Mansfield’s letters helped explain Elliot herself.

Thus, this moving collection of letters between Mansfield and her husband sheds important light on how Elliot saw herself, reflecting her challenges in her relationship with her parents, her deep connection with her brother Tom, her passionate love for her husband, her strong and deeply private emotions, her determination to face her own mortality, and her dedication to excellence in her work.  

I read this book during a very intense summer a few years ago when I was trying to figure out if Christianity could possibly be true, and how a nerdy secular academic like myself could even begin to ask that question.

I found a kindred spirit in Sheldon Vanauken. In this memoir set mainly in the 1950s, he tells the story of how he took a sabbatical from his teaching job at a little college in Virginia to go to Oxford with his wife. Neither of them was religious at the time. In fact, the first part of the book is a very intense (some might say: cloyingly sentimental) account of their romance, when they basically worshipped each other instead of a deity.

If you’re like me, you’ll want to shout “get a room already” and throw the book at the wall during the first few chapters. But I’m glad… show more.

I love this book because it captures the magic of bookstores. Told through a series of letters, the book made me want to hop on a plane (and time machine) and travel to what seems to be one of the most charming bookstores, full of charming booksellers. It’s the people, after all, that make a great bookstore great.

When I was working on the fundraising campaign to raise money for the statue of Virginia Woolf for Richmond, I was constantly being quoted the line, “I’d rather die than live in Richmond.” This line, uttered by Nicole Kidman as Woolf in The Hours, was completely made up by the screenwriter. 

Woolf’s decade (1914–1924) in Richmond was actually one of her most prolific. She launched the Hogarth Press, wrote major works, and hosted literary gatherings whilst also navigating the upheaval of World War I. This book, drawing from her letters and diaries, paints a richer picture of her time in Richmond. I think this bio-pic would challenge the Bloomsbury-dominated narrative and put pay to that rogue quote.

I first read this book as an angsty artist in college. It was as if the Universe sent me a gift that I needed precisely when I needed it. Rilke–an older/wiser poet, wrote the 10 letters in the book to a young Franz Kappus–a budding/insecure poet. All artists suffer from insecurity, and Kappus wants to know if his poems are good and what he should do.

We all want to do Important and Good work (with capital I’s and G’s). Rilke gently and masterfully steers Kappus to understand that true art is a process and involves every aspect of an artist’s life, that it is often a lonely endeavor but worth it for so many reasons. I felt as if Rilke was speaking to me–as a loving grandfather–with words of encouragement, but also in truth. Nothing was sugar-coated, but I so related and wanted to be the wise creator that… show more.

I relish the intimacy of reading Austen’s private letters, and this is the best and most complete edition. Although her sister Cassandra notoriously burned many of her letters, the 160-or-so that survive offer plenty of unguarded moments to satisfy curiosity about her daily life.

In fact, I think Austen’s best lines are not from her novels but from her letters to Cassandra. For example, on the fashion for decorating bonnets, she quips “I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit.” And in a note about their garden: “I will not say that your Mulberry trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive.”