Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories

A collection of late-Victorian stories that interrogate the very nature of romantic correspondence. The centerpiece follows Eastlake, a man haunted by a chance meeting with Miss Armstrong, who fills his letters with longing and literary flourish. But Armstrong refuses to be a passive recipient of his nostalgia. She pushes back, questioning whether his elegant words are genuine feeling or merely aesthetic performance, urging him to engage with life rather than prettily contemplate it from a distance. This tension, between sentiment and sincerity, between the lived moment and its literary reconstruction, runs through Herrick's entire collection. These are stories about people trying to read each other correctly, failing, and trying again through the imperfect medium of letters. The result is both a romance and a critique of romance, a book that understands how easily language becomes a way of avoiding rather than expressing what we truly feel.