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This collection of letters by Olga Jacoby was first published by her husband in 1919 for private distribution and then again in 1920 for a wider readership. It was rediscovered by Trevor Moore who was intrigued by a copy he found on a library shelf. In a timely coincidence, child psychotherapist Jocelyn Catty had recently become aware of these letters written by her great-grandmother. She had also decided to re-publish the letters. So, despite the intervening decades when these letters had receded from family and public memory, there is a picking up of threads in the fabric of this edition. Sandwiched between the discovery and detective work of the foreword and the informative afterword, Olga Jacoby’s letters read with both an immediacy and the sense of time passing.
Olga Jacoby writes her letters in the knowledge that she is dying. She is only 34 and has young children. Her life is prolonged for years, rather than the anticipated months; her letters span 1909–1913, and they end with her death, when she is no longer well enough to spend much time with the children and ‘life has lost all charm and values’. She takes a ‘sleeping draught’ (p. 199). It is desperately sad to die so young and to leave young children. However, the reader is left with a sense not of desolation but of an intense engagement with life. Most of her letters are to her friend and doctor. As she attempts to wrestle with the knowledge of her impending early death, she refutes the Christian doctrine he offers and, describing herself as a Rationalist, she turns to nature for meaning and comfort: ‘This Earth holds all my love, all my respectful admiration, which feelings I can best prove by gracefully submitting to its laws when they seem hard to me’ (p. 12).
Jacoby does not see the world as the doctor sees it but their exchange of ideas and the books they recommend and lend to each other are evidence of her lively mind, her strong social conscience and interest in politics. The to and fro of their deba