Letter
For a glimpse into her life, here are excerpts from a letter sent to an Albert Northrop, presumed husband to her niece Elizabeth (Betty):
January 29, 1950.
Dear Albert,
Your nice birthday letter should have had an answer long before this, but so many things do seem to come between me and writing even the letters that I want to much to write. The birthday was a very portentous one, my sixty-fifth, which means I am no longer eligible for Bryn Mawr after June; they have to keep me until then. By a singular chance they have given me more work to do than ever before, quite regardless of the fact that in six months I shall be considered totally unfit...
You were so good to speak so kindly of Violent Men and Two Arrows. The former had been in hand for a very long time, quite the largest piece of work I had ever undertaken, but it has been the one that I most enjoyed. I have a real passion for history, which grows as the years go by, and was whetted ever more by my seeing some of it being made first hand while I was doing a very humble job in Washington. I realized that if I did not finish it while I was at Bryn Mawr I never would, so I finally succeeded in getting it finished and out of my hands. The Macmillan Company had it for a long time before they published it, so, since I had promised a child's book as the very next thing, I wrote that last year and they came out rather embarrassingly close together. You were a very good friend to read them both. You always give such nice detailed comments, not like the reviewers, or sometimes even the writer of the blurb on the cover who have visibly not got much farther than Chapter six or so...
Nina (signed in her hand)
Read more about this topic: Cornelia Meigs
Famous quotes containing the word letter:
“This letter will be delivered to you by my child,—the child of my adoption,—my affection! Unblest with one natural friend, she merits a thousand. I send her to you innocent as an angel, and artless as purity itself; and I send you with her the heart of your friend, the only hope he has on earth, the subject of his tenderest thoughts, and the object of his latest cares.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“Your letter is come; it came indeed twelve lines ago, but I
could not stop to acknowledge it before, & I am glad it did not
arrive till I had completed my first sentence, because the
sentence had been made since yesterday, & I think forms a very
good beginning.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)