Dear Rora: I love you, and so I am letting you go. I love you no less in saying this; in fact, maybe I can love you more freely now that I can say that I am not responsible for you. I cannot help you. I am not even near brave enough to call you because I am afraid of the gaping silence at the other end of the line. I don’t know where you…

Previously: Ayn Rand, Cat Fancier. The Letters of Ayn Rand is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. It is a perpetual source of comfort and inspiration to me. Every morning, Ayn Rand must have thrust herself forth from her steel bed and asked herself "What is the most Ayn Rand thing that I can do today?" On May 22, 1949, the answer was to write a letter to her young niece, who…

Thanks to "pure serendipity", Crook had chanced upon the largest collection of unpublished letters by the author of Frankenstein to be discovered in decades. The letters date between 1831, nine years after the death of her poet husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and 1849, when Mary Shelley was already unwell with the brain tumour that would kill her two years later, and show a woman who was skilled in…