Blog Tour: ‘The Love that Dares’ by Rachel Smith and Barbara Vesey

Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for ‘The Love that Dares’, a collection of letters by LGBTQ+ writers throughout the ages.

Thanks to Random Things Tours for inviting me on to the tour and for my copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

This book was published on 27th January 2022 by Ilex Press.

From the Publisher:

A good love letter can speak across centuries and reassure us that the agony and the ecstasy one might feel in the 21st century have been shared by lovers long gone. This is all the truer of LGBTQ+ love letters: love affairs and relationships that, until very recently, had to survive within sealed envelopes and behind closed doors.

In ‘The Love That Dares’, queer love speaks its name through the words of lovers from years gone by. Alongside the more famous names coexist beautifully written letters by lesser-known lovers, giving us an insight into queer love outside of the spotlight of fame or fortune. Compiled by Bishopsgate archivists Rachel Smith and Barbara Vesey, these letters give us a glimpse into the passion and courage it took to continue a gay relationship in times when it was at best improper, and at worst illegal. Enlightening introductions to each set of letters give readers an idea of the
historical context in which they were written.

My Review:

I’m always intrigued by collections of letters – the brilliant ‘Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience’ by Shaun Usher really sets the bar for this type of book. However, this book has the added dimension in looking at how LGBTQ+ people – often marginalised and even criminalised throughout history – communicated their love and friendship.

The book opens with a foreword by Mark Gatiss which draws attention to the importance of this book in presenting voices that have been traditionally silenced. It creates a record of LGBTQ+ love that hasn’t always been visible or accepted by societies. The authors also introduce the work (and each of the letters individually) with the explanation that many of the letters come from the Special Collections at Bishopsgate Institute – a place that sounds like a veritable treasure trove of fascinating stuff!

The collection starts with Sappho in Ancient Greece and comes up to date with Ivan Nuru (born 1999). The letters are in chronological order according to the writer’s life – some chapters are one letter, others snippets of several, some long, some short. There are plenty of well-known names here – Oscar Wilde, Benjamin Britten, Walt Whitman, Vita Sackville-West, James I, George Sand, etc – but also some less famous voices. The less familiar writers tended to be modern-day ones (where I guess there is more surviving material than from some of the older correspondents who were often living covert LGBTQ+ lifestyles for their own safety).

It’s so hard to do justice to the whole collection in one review, mainly because there is so much diversity in the writers, relationships and content. I liked that the book included a whole spectrum of LGBTQ+ relationships, including friendship. I’m teaching Emily Dickinson poetry at the moment, so I really appreciated reading her words to her much-loved friend (lover?), Susan Huntington Gilbert. Susan ended up marrying Dickinson’s brother and the dedications of poems to Gilbert were removed by Dickinson’s editor – it feels like there is so much more to this fascinating story!

That is true of so much of this collection – the letters give an intriguing snapshot but don’t tell the whole story. Smith and Vesey do a good job of providing relevant and interesting contextual information, but it is so sad that many of these stories have been lost to the past.

The letters themselves are often full of anguish as writers grapple with the strength of their feelings (especially at times and in places when even the existence of the same-sex relationship was illegal). However, there is also much joy and revelling in romance, sex and love too. There are some gorgeous and touching letters – my favourites being the letters packed with mutual adoration that passed between Benjamin Brittain and his long-term partner, Peter Pears. There are also some in the collection that are slightly more (*blush*) earthy and others that are are beautifully romantic.

I’d recommend this book as an intriguing look at letters between people whose relationships haven’t always been allowed to flourish. The full range here – anguished to joyful, romantic to prosaic, explicit to covert – is definitely worth a read.

If you’d like a copy of this gorgeous book, please use my affiliate link below – thanks for supporting my blog with any purchases.