I give you...Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters to Algarotti! (From 1721-1751. For the last few letters, I'm still waiting on that volume from the library. But this is most of them.)
Guys, they're in French! I had no idea. She broke into French for her most passionate letters, apparently because French is the language of love and English couldn't begin to express the depth and strength of her emotions.
This is not something she normally does! In 500 pages of letters, 32 are in French, and 11 of those are to Algarotti. The others seem to be largely to French people who presumably don't speak English. But she starts writing to Algarotti in English, and then switches to French when her emotions become too strong (switching occasionally back to English). Woooow.
Guys, she's obsessed. o.O
After picking my very slow way through a subset of the French, I accidentally discovered that the back of the book has the English translations, haha. (I discovered this while deciding to flip through the entire book to see how often she writes in French. Then all the French letters were collated and translated in the last few pages, yay. Then I felt silly. :P) So I scanned and uploaded those as well, for those of us whose French is very slow.
Oh, and apologies for the sometimes slanted or wavy writing. Holding the book flat and scanning and getting a good quality picture was hard. But it should be readable in all cases. As always, let me know if you can't access the files. (I live in horror of this, ever since sending a blast email announcing my wedding, with a link to our wedding registry that apparently worked only if you were logged in as me.)
Re: Algarotti
Guys, they're in French! I had no idea. She broke into French for her most passionate letters, apparently because French is the language of love and English couldn't begin to express the depth and strength of her emotions.
This is not something she normally does! In 500 pages of letters, 32 are in French, and 11 of those are to Algarotti. The others seem to be largely to French people who presumably don't speak English. But she starts writing to Algarotti in English, and then switches to French when her emotions become too strong (switching occasionally back to English). Woooow.
Guys, she's obsessed. o.O
After picking my very slow way through a subset of the French, I accidentally discovered that the back of the book has the English translations, haha. (I discovered this while deciding to flip through the entire book to see how often she writes in French. Then all the French letters were collated and translated in the last few pages, yay. Then I felt silly. :P) So I scanned and uploaded those as well, for those of us whose French is very slow.
Oh, and apologies for the sometimes slanted or wavy writing. Holding the book flat and scanning and getting a good quality picture was hard. But it should be readable in all cases. As always, let me know if you can't access the files. (I live in horror of this, ever since sending a blast email announcing my wedding, with a link to our wedding registry that apparently worked only if you were logged in as me.)