“A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment, the transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence. And we adapt our style to our correspondent.”Source: P D James, Time to be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 79.
Image: “A letter captures the mood of the moment…”