From writer with love

A POINT OF VIEW

Ever since the art of letter writing was perfected in the Renaissance, private letters and intimate secrets have gone hand in hand. Lisa Jardine reflects on the art and dangers of writing secret missives - from love notes and confidential documents to illicit text messages.

Among the 35 or so luminous paintings that survive by 17th century Dutch artist Jan Vermeer, six of the best-known take as their subject a young woman reading a love letter.

Sometimes she is alone, sometimes a female servant hovers discreetly at her shoulder. In some she is engrossed in reading, in others she is absorbed in composing a letter herself.

Jan Vermeer's paintings often portrayed women reading love letters.

Where the maid is poised to carry the completed missive to its destination, she holds the precious page, folded and sealed with wax, against her bodice, the name of its intended recipient concealed from us.

How do we know these are love letters? Well, to begin with, the young woman is to all intents and purposes alone, in a period when decorum required that when a single woman received a written communication a parent or relative ought to be present. Often a letter intended for a daughter would be enclosed within one addressed to her father or mother, respectfully requesting that it be passed to her.

Usually the young woman concerned would then have read her letter aloud. So here we have a young woman reading a message which has apparently been delivered directly to her by a personal maid, and is pored over unsupervised.

Erotic intensity

This helps to explain why in each of these paintings the expression on the young woman's face lies somewhere between the complicit and the furtive. Besides, the paintings are atmospherically infused with an aura of delicious secrecy. The light flooding through a half-open window illuminates her face, which is filled with barely-disguised anticipation. Something illicit is going on here, that is for sure.

Fiction of the 17th and 18th Centuries, often uses the dramatic possibilities offered by covert exchanges of letters to heighten erotic intensity. In Eliza Haywood's popular amatory novel Love in Excess, published in 1720, handwriting is the clue that gives away the lover's identity, threatening the reputation of the sender.

Recognition of the handwriting can add a note of conviction, or at any rate an element of pleasure, to a letter Erasmus of Rotterdam

The devastatingly attractive Count D'elmont, in some confusion because he is simultaneously being pursued by two desirable young women, returns the wrong love letter to his rejected sweetheart Amena. She recognizes the handwriting as that of her best friend, thereby discovering to her dismay that her trusted confidante is in fact her secret rival.

Samuel Richardson's 18th-century epistolary novels Pamela and Clarissa are both couched in the form of intricate exchanges of intimate letters, in which passions and betrayals are candidly revealed, to the delight or dismay of the letters' recipients.

Closer to our own day, the plot of Edgar Allen Poe's short story, The Purloined Letter, turns on the detective Dupin's recognising the handwriting on a fragment of a compromising letter stolen from a lady of Royal status.

An obliging letter

In his textbook, On the Education of boys, the 16th-century pedagogue Erasmus of Rotterdam stresses how important it is that those in high places should be able to write a good legible hand themselves, rather than relying on a secretary:

"Recognition of the handwriting can add a note of conviction, or at any rate an element of pleasure, to a letter [he writes]. One should remember that the apostle Paul sent his Letter to the Galatians entirely in his own handwriting.

When we get letters in their own hand from friends and fellow-scholars, how we welcome them and seem to be listening to their very voices and to be looking at them face to face."

Hand-written letters are harder to counterfeit. Erasmus's Treatise on Letter Writing, which went through numerous editions in Latin and the vernaculars after its first publication in the early 1520s, defines a familiar letter as "a kind of mutual exchange of speech between absent friends".

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Starting with simple instructions on the formal Latin ways of beginning and ending a letter, he goes on to provide lists of phrases to be used in writing letters of all types, from a "friendly consolation with a rebuke" to "a letter of invective", "an obliging letter" or a "letter of entreaty".

Few of us can still find time to write these kinds of carefully crafted familiar letters nowadays. The finer points of epistolary exchange are no longer observed. And the only attempt I have made to dissemble my own handwriting recently was on the Valentine's Day card I sent my husband last weekend.

Yet the situation remains very much as it was four centuries ago when it comes to interception and inadvertent disclosure of confidential correspondence. Now as then, reputations are wrecked by a single indiscreet communication which has fallen into the wrong hands being circulated and broadcast to a wider public.

Electronic subterfuge

Except that nowadays, amorous liaisons are more likely to be betrayed by emails and text messages than by purloined letters.

Golfer Tiger Woods is just one imprudent husband whose infidelity was discovered when his wife read passionate text messages to another woman on his mobile phone. Footballer Ashley Cole allegedly "bombarded a pretty secretary with nude photos and raunchy text messages" in 2008, sending "hundreds of texts over a two-month period". Now these have been passed to a tabloid newspaper, and he too has some explaining to do to his wife.

Handwritten letters are harder to counterfeit

Our 18th-century amorous fiction-writer Eliza Haywood would have relished the way in which intimate exchanges of electronic messages, conducted with all the careful subterfuge Vermeer's young women used to conceal their love letters, once suddenly disclosed, turn amatory worlds upside-down.

There are, however, some contexts in which real letters, set out in the way people used to be taught to do at school, are still sent and received. These are the ones written by lawyers acting on a client's behalf, and generally dispatched to other lawyers acting for another client.

Here again the electronic age makes it harder than ever before to keep the most sensitive of letters confidential. Although lawyer's communications continue to be composed on paper, they then tend to be scanned, and dispatched electronically. It is a simple matter for such a letter to be circulated in multiple copies at the click of a mouse.

Virtually indestructible

Earlier this month, we learned that Lord Neuberger's ruling in the Binyam Mohamed case had been delivered with a crucial paragraph deleted, after a last-minute intervention by a top lawyer representing the government. Having read the draft judgment (which was sent out electronically, but encrypted), the QC "protested over the strength of a judge's 'exceptionally damaging' criticism of the British security service", and Lord Neuberger was persuaded to modify his ruling. The following day, the letter sent by Jonathan Sumption QC to Lord Neuberger, could be viewed in its entirety on a reputable newspaper's website.

Both the deletion and the leaked letter caused a furore among the participants in the legal action. Those acting for Binyam Mohamed deplored the alteration to Lord Neuberger's ruling; those acting for the government demanded and got an apology from the QC who had released the letter to the press. No doubt more under-cover documents will emerge before the matter is settled, but of one thing I personally feel sure. I prefer to live in a country whose judiciary generally supports our right of free access to information, rather than one which would have kept the entire matter tidily under wraps.

Letters used to be considered a genre in themselves, a literary form. Intellectuals and artists corresponded with one another in the hope or expectation that their letters might be preserved for posterity, and would one day appear in print. Today, by contrast, we treat electronic communications - emails and texts - as the most fleeting and ephemeral of things, barely worth dignifying with our attention with regard to punctuation, spelling or grammar.

The humble love letter is being replaced by text and email

Yet these messages are virtually indestructible, lingering on back-up discs and in electronic archives long after we have forgotten we ever wrote them. These are the fatal exchanges that may eventually come home to haunt us, months and years after they were sent.

In the 17th century when letter-writing was part of everybody's education and their composition a matter of pride, their survival was a matter of chance. As such they provide an erratic window into the past. But now, when we hardly give a second thought to how we express ourselves in an email or text, we can never be sure that that missive will not eventually be retrieved and closely scrutinised in the public domain. Caveat scripter - writer beware.

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