Writing in a conversational first person, Dr. Crabb looks at each individual book in Scripture and boils it down to a short chapter answering the question: What does God want me to hear from this love letter?

Love letters during the Napoleonic wars were largely framed by concepts of love which were promoted through novels and philosophy. The standard texts, so to speak, which were written by major authors who inherited this Enlightenment bearing, responded to the emerging concepts of love found in novels and philosophical essays. Love among this Napoleonic coterie is unique because it demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between the love letter and the romantic novel. Germaine de Staël, Juiette Récamier, Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, Lady Emma Hamilton, Napoleon Bonaparte and his brother, Lucien Bonaparte, were the authors and recipients of some of the most passionate love letters of this period. They were also avid readers of the newly emerging genre of the romantic novel, and many of them were also authors of such works where they projected their personal romances onto the characterization of their fictional heroes and heroines. In addition, these authors had lived through the recent French Revolution and the Terror. Imprisoned during the Revolution, or branded as emigrés upon their return to Paris, their mature adult lives were spent in the shadows of the Napoleonic wars in which they shifted political loyalties as the specter of Napoleon’s powers grew from First Consul to Emperor of Europe. The looming threat of war ignited the depths of their passions and inspired their intellectual analysis of love, happiness and suicide. Their evolving concept of love was a romantic, all-consuming passion which gripped the lovers in fatal embraces. This book’s analysis of their love letters and romantic novels reveals the emerging political landscape of the period through extended metaphors of love and patriotism.

"An Englishwoman's Love-Letters" by Laurence Housman was a scandal in its time due to its frankness, in which excitement turned to disappointment as the public learned the author was no Englishwoman but Housman. This book encapsulates romance skillfully and allowed countless women to live vicariously through the story told through these letters and words of longing and love. To this day, it's a top pick for lovers of romance.

EloIsa, an old woman who in her youth was brutally sexually abused by three masked men, remembers on the last day of her life the stark story that marked her. She tells it to one of the nurses in the sanatorium in which she is dying while allowing her to scrutinize a ringed booklet that contains printed all the letters that she exchanged in his youth with Abelard, the only love of her life. Maenza reflects on the psychological, ethical and philosophical aspects of western love and weaves a sweet and intelligent discourse where time, love rites and erotic presence are subtly addressed. It includes a singular vision of writing and a very particular and symbolic Theory of Affection that is used in its analysis of the metaphysics of colors, the zodiacs, the sensations coming from the senses, the imaginary of the alchemist beasts, the classic elements and the arcana of the Tarot. In an age where relationships are made with the dizzying modernity and liquid love swarms (according to Bauman), ”All love letters are ridiculous” claims that secular ritual of love correspondences, increasingly in decline, and he apologizes for the slowness that Kundera claims for romances. ”All love letters are ridiculous” is constructed as a parodic narration of romance novels, but at the same time it is a modern dissertation about love coupled with a story of affection and an ending of tragedy that brings taboo themes like abuse, reification of women and contemporary violence. Translator: Gastón Jofre Torres PUBLISHER: TEKTIME

Juliette Drouet's Love-Letters to Victor Hugo : Edited with a Biography of Juliette Drouet In the first portion we present the biography of Juliette Drouet in the form of a series of synthetic tableaux, each tableau summarising several lustres of her life. We thus avoid the long-drawn-out narrative, year by year, of an existence devoid of incident or adventure. In the second, we publish those letters which strike us as peculiarly eloquent, witty, or lyrical. In the light shed upon them by the preliminary biography, they form, as one might say, its justification and natural sequel. At the outset of her liaison with the poet Juliette does not date her “scribbles”; she merely notes the time of day and the day of the week, until about 1840; we have therefore been obliged to content ourselves with the classification effected by her in the collection of her manuscripts, and preserved by her executor. From 1840 she dated every sheet. Consequently our work simultaneously achieves more precision and certainty.

In 1927, tired of the literary life of New York City, New Orleans, and Chicago, a famous but aging American writer named Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) -- author of Winesburg, Ohio(1919) and other short stories in which he virtually invented the modern American short-story -- moved to rural Southwest Virginia to write for and edit two small-town weekly newspaper that he owned, the Marion Democrat. and the Smyth County News. Living again among the small-town figures with whom he was usually most content, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolf, and indeed an entire generation of the greatest American writers -- worked for several years at making his newspaper nationally famous while struggling to come to terms with a life-threatening psychological depression and a failing third marriage. Both of Anderson's midlife problems were complicated when he met Eleanor Copenhaver, lovely young daughter in one of the prominent first families of Marion and a career social worker for the YWCA. Trying to keep their ardent affair secret in the small town, Anderson avidly courted the socially prominent and much younger Miss Copenhaver while at the same time trying to free himself from his embittered third wife and overcome the disadvantages of his age and his lover's family's distrust of him.Having by the end of 1931 continued for three years his surreptitious and consuming affair with Miss Copenhaver, Anderson determined on the first day of 1932 that the new year should be the year of decisions for him to gain his love in marriage or perhaps to end his life, and he began the new year with a creative venture unique in literature. Starting on January1, Anderson secretly wrote and hid away for Eleanor Copenhaver to find after his eventual death one letter each day, letters that she should someday discover, whether they had ever become married or not, and thereby relive in her memory their days of intense lovemaking a mutual despair about their then-unlikely marriage.Found by Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson only at Sherwood Anderson's death in 1941 and then preserved intact by this grieving widow who had married Anderson in 1933, the carefully hidden letters of 1932 recording their intense and seemingly doomed love affair have remained secret until now. Chosen by Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson before her death in 1985 to publish her husband's secret love letters, Anderson scholar Ray Lewis White has prepared a fascinating edition of these unique letters for the enjoyment of students and scholars of literature as well as for all other readers who savor compelling and inspiring stories of loss and love.