BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, [13 NOV. 1916]
BRACERS 19077. ALS. McMaster. SLBR 2: #280
Edited by S. Turcon and N. Griffin. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<letterhead>
57 Gordon Square1 , 2
W.C.
In the train.3
Monday.

It was quite wonderful of you my dearest Darling to find time to write this morning4 before such an early start.  I had only just finished dressing when you were starting.  It is a heavenly day — I do hope it will be the same tomorrow.  My dear one your little letter is such a happiness.  There are many ways of love that are hard to understand. It is stronger than one’s Self — and it is hard not to struggle against it with one’s will. At the end last night I quite understood the mood you had been in.  I feel oddly ashamed with you of being so old — so settled and poised —  I wish I were not.  But it is no use struggling against the inevitable effect of the years one has lived.  If my love were more fierce it would satisfy you more.  But all fierceness is gone out of me — I love you with an infinite gentleness, the sort of way the sun loves the frozen earth in spring — but I cannot be fierce any more — there is too much of all the world’s suffering in everything I feel deeply — I can’t separate you or my love of you from the world. The separate hope — the private heaven — are things grown impossible to me. This has only happened rather lately — since the war.  The last time I cared seriously, I was fierce and she was5 as I am now.

There is a development one must go through. I feel you are going through it.  At first one’s ego is hard and entire, with firm boundaries and strong exclusions.  Then some deep feeling breaks down one’s defences, leaving one exposed and vulnerable.  At last, if one has enough courage, one ceases to need defences or to mind exposure to the world — one’s separate Self seems no longer important.  That happens when one has achieved a serenity independent of happiness.

Dearest, Beloved, I love you absolutely — I long to give you all happiness.

Tomorrow, my Beloved —

B

Notes

• 1

  [document] Document 200045.

• 2

  [envelope] The Lady Constance Malleson | Cat & Fiddle Hotel | near Buxton | Derbyshire. Pmk: MANCHESTER | 530 PM | 13 NOV | 1916 | M

• 3

  In the train En route to Manchester where BR was to lecture.

• 4

  to write this morning Colette’s letter of “Monday early” (BRACERS 112963).

• 5

  she was The sentence was followed by a note in Colette’s hand: “[Ottoline CM]”. Lady Ottoline Morrell, née Cavendish-Bentinck (1873–1938). Ottoline, who was the half-sister of the 6th Duke of Portland and grew up in the politically involved aristocracy, studied at St. Andrews and Oxford. She married, in 1902, Philip Morrell (1870–1943), who became a Liberal M.P. in 1910. She is best known as a Bloomsbury literary and artistic hostess. BR and she had a passionate but non-exclusive love affair from 1911 to 1916. They remained friends for life. She published no books of her own but kept voluminous diaries (now in the British Library) and was an avid photographer of her guests at Garsington Manor, near Oxford. (The photos are published in Lady Ottoline’s Album [London: Michael Joseph, 1976] and mounted at the website of the National Portrait Gallery.) In the 1930s she had a large selection of BR’s letters to her typed, omitting intimate passages. BR’s letters to her are with the bulk of her papers at the University of Texas, Austin, with copies and her original letters in RA.