CELIA ROMANA

The scarce first edition of this popular collection of love letters by an anonymous author, whose pen-name was Celia Romana, Gentlewoman. The writer has fallen madly in love with a man to whom she jots down intense love letters – this being a small selection from more than 1,000 in 12 years – torn between expressing all her feelings and trying to maintain self-restraint. This man lives elsewhere, and only occasionally comes to her city, being, on those sparse occasions, very busy with meetings and parties, causing a lag in the epistolary communication which throws the writer into a panic. Her language betrays some difficulty in the elegant construction of sentences, whether due to the author’s own educational background or as a rhetorical technique to make the letters sound genuine and prey to passion (Matt, passim). ‘As the C16 progressed, early modern writers continued to capitalize on the converging trends of epistolary literature and widespread interest in describing the female experience, turning increasingly to manuals and repertoires for guidance. […] Popular epistolary narratives such as “Lettere amorose” […] began to codify representations of the woman writer as an epistolary character motivated by passion and lovesickness. Models for such fictionalized and generalized female narrators, who fell from grace as they abandoned the feminine ideals of chastity and silence to follow their hearts, abounded’ (Ray, p.123). A most interesting, scarce literary work.