Friday, February 13, 2015

Straight from the heart: the best love letters


Valentine’s Day is coming, and with it a poll to identify the greatest ever love letters. Here’s our alternative list, but which epistle would you nominate?
Vita Sackville-West
‘I am reduced to the thing that wants Virginia’ … Vita Sackville-West. Photograph: Lenare/Getty Images
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, life insurance company Beagle Street has polled 1,000 people to find the “greatest love letters ever written”. Their list - entirely composed, incidentally, of letters by men, to women - is topped by Johnny Cash’s note to his wife, June Carter, on her 65th birthday.
Cash’s words are sweet, and heartfelt:
“We get old and get use to each other. We think alike. We read each other’s minds. We know what the other wants without asking. Sometimes we irritate each other a little bit. Maybe sometimes take each other for granted. But once in awhile, like today, I meditate on it and realize how lucky I am to share my life with the greatest woman I ever met.”
But the greatest love letter ever written? I’m sorry, Beagle Street and your 1,000 surveyees, but no. Here are five of our personal favourites – we’ve even managed to dig up a few by women …

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