Literature and the lost art of letter writing

"The art of letter writing is like the art of acting in that it is the impression of spontaneity which usually makes a performance convincing. Great letter writers, like great actors, have a gift for immediacy, for the here and now, the depth of expression depending on its closeness to the actual processes of thought. Even when we are not the addressee but a later reader, they make us feel that we are members of a fortunate audience. With the very best letters of all it is as if we are reading along with the original recipient yet hearing the voice of the writer at the moment of composition, occupying some theatricalized realm where the usual rules of time and space are in abeyance."

So begins a wonderful review in a recent Times Literary Supplement of the collected letters of Ellen Terry. I had no idea who Ellen Terry was, and am not really that interested in her, but the essay made me think about how the computer age has altered (or even done away with) the centuries-old literary form of letter writing.

I think the reviewer makes an excellent point about what a letter often was: " . . . the impression of spontaneity which . . . makes the performance convincing." Letters were once often meant not just for the person to whom they were sent, but rather meant to be passed around, shared, and read aloud. They were performance art; they were popular literature.

Of course this makes me think of what email (and Twitter, and Facebook, and . . . ) have done to the art form. Forty years ago I was a diligent letter writer. I enjoyed writing them, and those who got them wrote back. I wrote in longhand, using a pen. Now I dash off emails, and these do not have the same authorial voice that my letters did. They're less interesting, I think.

My wife and I wrote letters back and forth across the continent for five years before we got married. Long-distance calls then were expensive. Besides, the letters were more than love letters; they were full of news, impressions, opinions, observations. The other reason the TLS essay struck a chord with me was that, while moving stuff around several months ago, we found a box full of them. They still make interesting reading for both of us -- far more interesting than any email I've sent anybody in the past decade.

I wonder if other folks have had a similar experience.

So you agree that the authorial voice is necessarily different between emails and traditional letters? Is this because they serve different functions?

Either way, it seems to me that the characteristic voice of traditional letters has nowhere to go, and thus may be lost.

You make a good point about blogs. The performance art quality of traditional letters of decades ago, an aspect discussed in the link I put in my OP, may well have gone there.