“Who Was She?” (cross-posted from social media)
Bayard Taylor’s “Who Was She?” is a lovely and moving story of a man and a woman in the Gilded Age who grope toward emotional and intellectual intimacy entirely via the written word. She knows his identity; hers, over the year or two of their correspondence, is a mystery to him. I was probably eleven or twelve when I first read it about ninety years after its original publication; a decade later, I lived something like the tale, and it has sufficiently coiled around the old brainstem that earlier in the present century I was moved to transcribe the thing (duplicating as nearly as I could the typography of the 1915 anthology of Greatest Short Stories in which I originally encountered the yarn) and render it into glorious ecumenical PDF, which I am pleased to share with anyone here who might be receptive to its melancholy charm.
cordially,
cordially,
