BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, [5 JAN. 1917]
BRACERS 19101. ALS. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<London>
Friday mg.1^, 2^, 3

My Beloved

Your letters are a great joy and support to me. You are so generous and full of courage — it is so splendid. — I am working my way through — I was tired out by the uncomfortable feeling of giving thought to personal things that ought to be given to the world — one has to strike a balance, because it would be no good to grow inhuman, but one has to have times of putting away everything personal and living quite austerely. I don’t suppose anything tangible will come of this time — but at any rate I shall regain the control of my thoughts by the will — they get so fearfully unruly at times. When my mind gets jangled I become incapable of enjoyment.

I saw Mrs Eliot4 2 days ago and told her I wouldn’t see her again for an indefinite time. I also don’t want to go to Garsington5 —  people with whom I am not very intimate don’t matter, but I don’t want to see people with whom I have to be more or less sincere — things are too vague in my mind to be talked about, and there is more despair in my feelings than I choose to express.

I am sorry Miles6 is still so troubled by Jean.7  It is a kind of thing that is not likely to come right in a moment, and I am afraid it will be a terrible strain on his vitality.  I hope he will remember that sanity is the thing to aim at, not a poetic Ophelia8 madness.

Goodbye my Darling — I feel your love with me, and it gives me happiness.

B.

• 1

  [document] Document 200073.

• 2

  [envelope] The Lady Constance Malleson | 43 Bernard Street | Russell Square | W.C.  Pmk: LONDON. | 3.15 ?? | JAN 5 17B

• 3

  [date] Colette wrote “5 Jan. 1917” on the letter.

• 4

  Mrs. Eliot Vivienne Eliot (1888–1947). For further information on her, see BRACERS 19062.

• 5

  Garsington Garsington Manor, near Oxford, the county home of Lady Ottoline and Philip Morrell.

• 6

  Miles Miles Malleson, Colette’s husband. For further information on him, see BRACERS 19046.

• 7

  Jean Jean Cavendish, Miles’s current girlfriend, who was ill. Colette described her on 24 December 1916 as “lovely to look at, generous, affectionate, and with a nice dash of devil-may-care”, quite different from Miles’s previous girlfriend (BRACERS 112985). Colette makes no mention of what Jean did, although she does comment in the same letter that Jean was a friend of the Brookes of Sarawak. There is an actress of that name credited for one film in 1918, “What Would a Gentleman Do?”; photographs of her appear on the National Portrait Gallery website taken in 1914 by Bassano.

• 8

  Ophelia of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.