Loving Words review: The letters of Australia's golden literary couple

Loving Words: Love Letters of Nettie and Vance Palmer, 1909 - 1914

Ed., Deborah Jordan

Brandl & Schlesinger, $$39.95

Vance and Nettie Palmer were Australia's most influential literary couple of the first half of the 20th century. Deborah Jordan compares their cultural achievements to those of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and "their mutual seduction" through letters to that conducted by Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. While the Palmers' early, self-consciously literary epistles don't quite live up to this comparison, everything changes halfway through the collection when the two young idealists fall in love. Suddenly their letters are fresh, urgent, alive. Writes Vance, "…this is the best thing God has ever shown me … Everything seems to be aflame with the miracle of it." Writes Nettie, "I feel that we have incredibly far to go, & that the world, & life & death are far bigger things than I ever guessed".