Letters from Centuries Past

In  an earlier post , I wrote about the controversy provoked by Harriet Beecher Stowe's article  The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life , which was published in The Atlantic Monthly in September 1869. Decades after the death of the famous British poet Lord Byron, Stowe accused…

While the Italian artist Michelangelo Buonarroti painted some of the most famous frescoes in art history —the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome and The Last Judgment on the Chapel's altar wall— he considered himself first and foremost a sculptor. During his lifetime, he…

American-British author Henry James and Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson were literary and personal friends. Their literary friendship began in 1884, when Stevenson responded to James' essay  The Art of Fiction  with an essay of his own, titled  A Humble Remonstrance  …

Anne of Green Gables (1908) is one of the most popular Canadian novels of all time. Written by Lucy Maud Montgomery, the novel tells the story of Anne Shirley —an imaginative orphan who is mistakenly sent to live with two elderly siblings, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert— and foll…

In his late twenties, German composer Ludwig van Beethoven began to lose his hearing. By then, he was already an accomplished musician, although many of his most famous works were still to come (including his late piano sonatas, Symphony No. 5 (1807-08) and Symphony No. 9 (182…

In the mid-1850s, having written numerous articles for the magazine Westminster Review , Mary Ann Evans decided to try her hand at writing fiction. For her first foray into the genre, she wrote three short stories ( The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton , Mr Gilfil’s Love…

While Dante Gabriel Rossetti was best known as a painter and a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he was also a gifted poet. He wrote many poems but initially left them unpublished. In 1862, when his wife Elizabeth Siddal died from a laudanum overdose, Rossetti, …

Most of the letters featured on this blog are found in books (mainly through Project Gutenberg or Internet Archive ) and are shown only in their transcribed form. Every now and then, however, I will reproduce the image of an original letter. For this post, I am sharing a short,…

In 1773, at the age of seventeen, Austrian-born composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was serving as a court musician in Salzburg under Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo. While the position offered him financial stability, over time Mozart became increasingly dissatisfied with his low …

This previous post  discusses how the French painter Paul Gauguin departed for Tahiti in 1891, in search of a life unaffected by European society. He eventually made some of his best work in Tahiti, including the monumental painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are …

In early 1888, Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Czech composer Antonín Dvořák met for the first time in Prague, where Tchaikovsky was scheduled to conduct two concerts of his own works. The men found they had a mutual admiration for each other's music, meeting s…

In the September 1869 issue of  The Atlantic Monthly , an article was published titled  The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life , written by the celebrated American author Harriet Beecher Stowe . In it, Stowe accused Lord Byron, the legendary British poet who had died four decades e…