Letters Database

Use the Letters Database to search the extensive holdings of correspondence that are in Special Collections.

Each record in the index represents an exchange of correspondence between two individuals.

A particular highlight is the collected mail of Sir Edmund Gosse. Here you can find correspondence from many writers of the late nineteenth century including autograph letters by authors Henry James, Thomas Hardy and WB Yeats.

Other correspondents featured in the Letters database include:

• critic Clement Shorter
• theatre manager and author Bram Stoker
• folklorist Edward Clodd
• playwright Henry Arthur Jones
• painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other members of the Rossetti family
• writer Charles Dickens
• naturalist Charles Darwin
• novelist Elizabeth Gaskell.

Highlights from our twentieth century correspondence include letters by Bonamy Dobree, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound and Herbert Read.

The Letters database is not an exhaustive index of all letters in Special Collections. You can find further correspondence in named archival collections. These collections can be browsed in the collections A-Z.