Journal to Stella

Back when this blog was new we featured Pepys's diary, a blog using Pepys's diary entries as its daily posts. Since then several similar blogs have sprung up, including the excellent WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier, consisting of letters from a soldier in the first World War. Then earlier this week (via Dovegreyreader) I came across Journal to  Stella, a blog based on the letters of Jonathan Swift to a woman called Esther Johnson. The thought I have when reading sites like these is something like "So this is what the Internet is for."Here's what the site has to say about the letters:

When Jonathan Swift began writing the series of letter-diaries now known as the Journal to Stella on 2 September 1710, he was a forty-three-year-old Irish country parson, and little more than that. Of the great Irish literary late-starters, even Samuel Becket (forty-nine when Waiting for Godot was staged in London) was successful slightly sooner. In fact Swift had to wait until the publication of Gulliver's Travels (1727) in his sixtieth year before he won real literary fame. The woman for whom Swift wrote the Journal to Stella, Esther Johnson, died shortly after Gulliver appeared, and probably never knew the scale of its triumph.

Here's the link again.

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