Famous letters in history

How these twelve letters were chosen

A letter is the closest thing history has to a recording of private thought. Each letter here is genuine, survives in the original or a reliable early copy, and can be read in full, most of them free online. Every quotation on this page is taken from the letter itself, with the date; where we only summarise, we say so.

They are in date order. Some changed history directly (Lincoln’s public letter of 1862, Ramanujan’s 1913 letter to Hardy); others matter because they show a famous person when no one was supposed to be watching. Several famous “letters” are left out because their authorship is doubtful; the Bixby letter attributed to Lincoln is discussed below.

Hildegard of Bingen to Bernard of Clairvaux (1146 to 1147): asking permission to speak

Hildegard of Bingen, then a little-known nun in her forties, wrote to Bernard of Clairvaux, the most powerful churchman in Europe, about the visions she had kept largely private since childhood, and asked whether she should speak of them.

Why it matters: support from Bernard and then Pope Eugenius III allowed her to write and publish her visions. About 300 of her letters survive, to popes, emperors and ordinary people.

Eleanor of Aquitaine to Pope Celestine III (1193): a mother’s demand

When her son Richard I was held prisoner in Germany on his way home from crusade, letters in the name of Eleanor of Aquitaine accused the pope of doing nothing to free a crusader king.

What most lists miss: the letters were drafted for her by the scholar Peter of Blois, whose dramatic style shows in every line. Many royal letters were written this way, which is a good reminder to ask who actually held the pen.

Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori (10 December 1513): the birth of The Prince

Dismissed, imprisoned and tortured after the Medici returned to Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote to his friend Vettori, an ambassador in Rome, describing his days on his small farm: trapping birds, quarrelling at the inn, and in the evening putting on his best clothes to read the ancient historians.

Why it matters: in this letter he first mentions the little book he has written on principalities, the work we call The Prince.

Galileo to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615): science and scripture

Galileo wrote this long public letter to Christina of Lorraine, mother of his patron the Grand Duke of Tuscany, after critics used the Bible against the idea that the Earth moves. He argued that scripture speaks in everyday language to reach ordinary people and should not be used to settle questions that observation and proof can decide.

What most lists miss: the letter’s best-known idea, that the Bible teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go, is one Galileo credits to someone else, the churchman Cardinal Baronius. The letter circulated in manuscript and was printed only in 1636. See did Galileo say “and yet it moves”.

Abigail Adams to John Adams (31 March 1776): “Remember the Ladies”

With Congress moving toward independence, Abigail Adams wrote from Braintree, Massachusetts, to her husband John in Philadelphia.

What most lists miss: the same letter begins with news of smallpox, the British evacuation of Boston and her worries about slavery in the South. And she threatened, half in jest, that the ladies would foment a rebellion if they were ignored. See Remember the Ladies.

John Adams to Abigail Adams (14 April 1776 and May 1780): the reply

John Adams answered on 14 April 1776 that he could not but laugh at her extraordinary code of laws, and insisted that men’s power over women was only nominal. Abigail was not convinced; she complained to her friend Mercy Otis Warren about his reply.

Four years later, writing from Paris, he set out what the struggle was for:

Over 1,100 letters between John and Abigail survive, one of the richest records of any marriage in history. See questions to ask Abigail Adams.

Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament (6 October 1802): despair and resolve

In the village of Heiligenstadt near Vienna, Ludwig van Beethoven, aged 31, wrote a letter to his brothers that he never sent. In it he admits that his growing deafness drove him to the edge of ending his life, and that only his art held him back, because he could not leave the world before producing all he felt he had in him.

What most lists miss: it was found among his papers after his death in 1827, along with another unsent letter, written in July 1812 to an unnamed “Immortal Beloved”, whose identity is still debated. See was Beethoven completely deaf.

Frederick Douglass to Thomas Auld (3 September 1848): to his former enslaver

On the tenth anniversary of his escape from slavery, Frederick Douglass published an open letter to the man who had legally owned him, recounting what slavery had done to him and his family and demanding news of his grandmother and sisters.

What most lists miss: the story did not end there. Douglass later visited Auld, by then an old man near death, in 1877, and wrote about their meeting in his last autobiography.

Abraham Lincoln to Horace Greeley (22 August 1862): the Union first

The newspaper editor Horace Greeley had publicly attacked Abraham Lincoln for moving too slowly against slavery. Lincoln’s reply was printed in the newspapers.

What most lists miss: when he wrote it, Lincoln had already drafted the Emancipation Proclamation and shown it to his cabinet in July 1862; the letter prepared the public for it. He ended by saying that his personal wish was that all men everywhere could be free. The famous Bixby letter of 1864, to a mother said to have lost five sons, may have been written by his secretary John Hay: see did Lincoln write the Bixby letter.

Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh (1872 to 1890): a life in letters

Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, an art dealer, for eighteen years: about books, religion, money, colour, Japanese prints, his illness and every painting he was working on, often with a small sketch in the margin.

What most lists miss: these letters were not published by Vincent or Theo but by Theo’s widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, who edited them and published them in 1914, and did more than anyone to make Vincent famous. All of them can now be read, with images, on the Van Gogh Museum’s letters site.

Marie Curie to Svante Arrhenius (December 1911): science and private life

In late 1911, while the French press attacked Marie Curie over her relationship with the physicist Paul Langevin, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius wrote suggesting she not come to Stockholm to collect her second Nobel Prize. She replied that the prize had been given for the discovery of radium and polonium, and that she saw no connection between her scientific work and the facts of her private life.

What most lists miss: she went to Stockholm and gave her Nobel lecture on 11 December 1911. We know the letter mainly through her biographers, such as Susan Quinn, so this entry summarises rather than quotes.

Srinivasa Ramanujan to G. H. Hardy (16 January 1913): the letter that changed mathematics

A 25-year-old clerk in Madras with no university degree sent the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy nine pages of theorems, without proofs.

What most lists miss: Ramanujan had written to other Cambridge mathematicians first without success. Hardy almost dismissed it too, but after studying it with J. E. Littlewood decided the results could only come from a mathematician of the highest class, and arranged for him to come to Cambridge. Some results were wrong; many were new.

Summary table: famous letters, dates and where to read them

Project ideas using famous letters

• Read the whole thing: choose one letter, read it in full, and write a 150 word summary that a classmate could check line by line against the original.
• Write the reply: answer Abigail’s 1776 letter as someone in her household might have, using only facts from 1776. Then compare with John’s real reply.
• Public or private: sort the twelve letters into those meant to be published and those meant to stay private. How does that change what the writer says?
• Ask the writer: prepare questions about a letter and try them with Abigail Adams or Vincent van Gogh on Yuga, where you can talk by voice or text with AI recreations built from their writings. They are not the real people and can be wrong, so quote the letters, not the app.

Guides that help: how to analyze a primary source, free primary source archives and how to check if a quote is real.