Letters Kirwan

As I was reading Wharton's letters I thought that I could sense the way she spoke was purposefully manipulated to be pleasing to who she was speaking to. The way she spoke to the women was different from the way she spoke to the men. It was more, I don't know how to exactly describe it, but flitting? Not as serious? The way she spoke to the men was more intelligently, or at least had more of an air of trying to show her intelligence.

James letters made me laugh because I read Wharton's first, and hers varied in length but usually were not very long, and then there is Jame's with all long letters with very few short ones, with long, long paragraphs, in true Jamesian style. His first letter to William I found to be very enjoyable in his descriptions, and his structure. It wasn't his later prose, he had short succinct sentences and a sort of liveliness to his writing that was quite a bit more engaging than a lot of his stories. This isn't to say that his stories weren't engaging just that they took more effort on the part of the reader to stick with and initially get caught up in, while the letter was immediately interesting.

The one concerning the death of Alice, was off to me in a way. It seemed more like he was exercising his writing skills in how well he could describe her death and condition than he was actually upset by her death. I don't know, I guess I thought he had a close relationship with her, and that letter seemed very cold and off-putting. I suppose it might be just that they had be expecting this for a while, and that it was best for Alice, due to her quality of life, but still I would have expected a little more lamenting or sorrow.

James letters to Hendrick Anderson were confusing, I don't know that if I had never heard of James's homosexual rumors that I wouldn't have picked up on something off in the letters on my own? Perhaps that was the way two men who were friends spoke to each other in their times of grief back then? But it seems over the top even for those times, but then again James letters to H. G. Wells are produced with that same kind of over the top??? exuberance and affection, and descriptive language so it is really almost impossible to judge for me, in my time, because things were so different back then, people talked differently and had different social codes. I think that if I had lived back then I would be able to determine whether or not these letters, or his works in general, betray a homosexual quality about him, but as of now there's too much difference in backgrounds.