Viola Meynell Letter to Gladys Huntington

Dearest Gladys,You will see the address on the enclosed account. I advise you to register the parcel. I have taken the occasion to pay their last [brie??]. The reading of this last half-page had a curious effect on me: - “Life in Rome was like ‘making it up as one goes along’ - first an improvisation.” There’s something about your writing which in a little casual-sounding phrase gets a whole volume of truth - I can hardly express what an utter sense of satisfaction it gives me. I literally don’t know any writing that brings me in more direct touch with life.In haste for post.Love,V

Dearest Gladys,

You will see the address on the enclosed account. I advise you to register the parcel. I have taken the occasion to pay their last [brie??].

The reading of this last half-page had a curious effect on me: - “Life in Rome was like ‘making it up as one goes along’ - first an improvisation.” There’s something about your writing which in a little casual-sounding phrase gets a whole volume of truth - I can hardly express what an utter sense of satisfaction it gives me. I literally don’t know any writing that brings me in more direct touch with life.

In haste for post.

Love,

V

37.absurdly indiscriminating, and the early complexes can be discerned in all sorts of ways. (Gratitude, the obligation for which was so impressed upon her when she was young, is now a kind of mania. She is always grateful for something - the word is ever on her lips; and she enforces gratitude to herself as though that, too, were part of her religion.) Well, I went to many more balls than did Marie Bashkirtseff, indeed I had a very good time when I "came out" in Rome, for American girls were the fashion, but life in Rome was like "making it up as one goes along" - just an improvisation. A few years later I spent a winter with my relations inWashington, and then I was happy for a reason I understood only a long time afterwards, happy in a way that has marked only two or three periods in my life.

37.

absurdly indiscriminating, and the early complexes can be discerned in all sorts of ways. (Gratitude, the obligation for which was so impressed upon her when she was young, is now a kind of mania. She is always grateful for something - the word is ever on her lips; and she enforces gratitude to herself as though that, too, were part of her religion.) Well, I went to many more balls than did Marie Bashkirtseff, indeed I had a very good time when I "came out" in Rome, for American girls were the fashion, but life in Rome was like "making it up as one goes along" - just an improvisation. A few years later I spent a winter with my relations in

Washington, and then I was happy for a reason I understood only a long time afterwards, happy in a way that has marked only two or three periods in my life.