Yours Always ― Letters of Longing

Love letters are potent. They breathe. They speak. They can arouse, comfort, captivate. They can also cut deep.

The powerful, deeply personal letters collected here reveal the painful underside of love. Witness Winston Churchill 'grown with anger to be treated with benevolent indifference' and Edith Piaf reel in the throes of a 'terrible' passion.

Through the letters of literary icons Charlotte Bronte, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf, Hollywood stars Elizabeth Burton and statesmen Henry VIII and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Yours Always offers an unusually intimate insight into the lives of such illustrious figures.

Love is revealed here in its many shades of disharmony and confusion: unrequited, uncertain, imbalanced, unconventional, thwarted, failed and forbidden. Love is not always rose-tinted, and Yours Always illuminates the sorrows that can accompany falling in, falling out, and staying in love.

Eleanor Bass is a freelance researcher and writer. Having previously read Theology at the University of Cambridge, she obtained her doctorate in English Literature from Kings College London in 2015.