HELL HATH NO FURY: Women's Letters from the End of the Affair

Whether a two-line note, a brief e-mail, an expansive retelling of a romance or a lamenting farewell, each letter in journalist Holmes's first book offers a snapshot from the end of an affair. With anger, sorrow, wit, intelligence and whining, such authors as Sylvia Plath, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anne Boleyn, Charlotte Brontë, Virginia Woolf and countless lesser-known women analyze what went wrong, say good-bye and address the future, some more happily than others, some impulsively and others with great forethought. Chapters group similar letters (the "tell off," the "just friends," the "marriage refusal," the "unsent letter," etc.), mixing contemporary and historical compositions, so that Monica Lewinsky's 1997 e-mail to President Bill Clinton follows Aline Bernstein's 1930s' correspondence with Thomas Wolfe in the "silent treatment" chapter, and the letter from a young woman named Lois to serviceman Harry Leister during WWII follows Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann's 1942 missive to film producer Irving Mansfield in the "Dear John" chapter. Holmes's comprehensive collection includes letters from epistolary and narrative novels beginning with Ovid's Heroides; prescriptive letters culled from letter-writing manuals; and unsent letters from as recently as October 2001. The careful reader will appreciate the subtle differences between many of the letters, but will have to plow through a quantity of less interesting work before happening on a gem. Many of the letters cannot stand on their own and beg for greater context and additional details about the author and the relationship. Still, literary romantics will have fun thumbing through this unique assemblage of send-off notes. Agent, Elizabeth Sheinkman. (Oct.)