What a Hazard a Letter Is Caroline Atkins (Safe Haven, £14.99)

This is an enchanting book and, quite soon, any countryhouse bedroom that doesn’t have it on one of its occasional tables won’t be worth sleeping in. it’s about letters that have been written, but never sent. These days, in the age of email, it’s all too easy to press ‘send’ and live to regret the consequences.

Letters on paper gave more time for consideration. You had to find the paper, for a start— as well as the pen, ink, address, stamp. There could be second thoughts, although the not posting of a letter—as George Darrow found in Edith Wharton’s The

Reef—might have significant consequences of its own. (in the case of Darrow, he has been given one to post by a young woman he met on a train to Paris, as a result of which she stays in Paris and—well, the woman whom he loves and was on the way to visit is none too pleased.)

There are unsent letters from fiction—trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, hardy’s Tess of the D’urbervilles, somerset Maugham’s Mrs Craddock—but the real-life examples are even more gripping. some never reached their recipient because one or other of the corresponding parties died, whether during the First World War, from suicide in the case of van Gogh or from natural causes. These are poignant.

Letters that were (in the words of a section title) Thought Better Of are in a different category. They reveal feelings that the writer decided, in the end, it would be unprofitable to express.

My favourite is one written by the almost blind cartoonist James Thurber to his friend Ernest hemingway, advising that his troubles should be put into perspective. To illustrate that it defied medical science that he could see at all with such poor eyes, Thurber quoted a doctor: ‘i suppose you could play the piano with both hands cut off at the wrists.’ That letter is closely followed by the one James Joyce’s publisher (saintly sylvia Beach of the bookshop shakespeare and Co in Paris) sent to the intolerably demanding author, and Franz Kafka’s to his father.

Good on abraham Lincoln for not burdening Gen George Meade with his exasperation after the latter had won the Battle of Gettysburg but, with an exhausted army, had failed to destroy the Confederates before they crossed the Potomac river.

The title of the book is provided by the poet Emily Dickinson. her letters to the Master— who might have been one of a number of older men of her acquaintance, assuming he actually existed—are hot stuff for a 19th-century spinster.

Don’t deprive yourself a moment longer. Buy the book. Clive Aslet

Her letters are hot stuff for a 19th-century spinster