The art of writing a love letter is as difficult as any. If you’re writing a love letter for Valentine’s Day, you know how tricky it is to write something original.
We’ve tried to make the task less intimidating. Rather than compiling the most beautiful prose ever written, we’ve gathered love letters from the more raunchy end of the spectrum. Valentine’s Day is about expressing yourself with no inhibitions – and these famous authors definitely didn’t have any.
If you’re reading and you’re at work or around children, we advise caution.
If you want to read something more gentle, check out our blog post about inspiring, more tasteful love letters.
Arthur Miller
Although Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe’s marriage was short, it was feverishly loving, especially in the early years. This description of the playwright and movie star spending a morning together is decidedly raunchy:
“I will kiss you and hold you close to me and sensational things will then happen. All sorts of slides, rollings, pitchings, rambunctiousness of every kind. And then I will sigh. And when you rest your head on my shoulder, then slowly I will get HUNGRY.
I will come again to the kitchen, pretending you are not there and discover you again. And as you stand there cooking breakfast, I will kiss your neck and your back and the sweet cantaloupes of your rump and the backs of your knees and turn you about and kiss your breasts and the eggs will burn.”
This letter was found in a lost archive of Marilyn Monroe’s most personal notes and correspondence. She held this collection close to her until her tragic, premature death at age 36. It is a warming reminder of the times in her short life she was passionately loved.
And it’s a reminder to tell our loved ones how we feel, because there is never enough time.
Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert was no stranger to scandal. He is most known for penning the novel Madame Bovary, serialised in the 19th century. It is a tour de force, but its description of adultery was controversial and shocking. He was even put on trial for obscenity for the book. Before he wrote Madame Bovary, however, he wrote this letter to his lover Louise Colet:
“I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you [sic] with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports… When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.”
Flaubert’s letter is a reminder of how seductive the written word can be. And that even in the most prudish cultures, steamy language will find its way into literature.
Henry Miller
Finally, we’ll finish with a sincerely inspiring letter by Henry Miller. He wrote this to Anaïs Nin, with whom he had an intense love affair with in the early 1930s. Henry Miller is of course known for writing sexually explicit works, perhaps most famously Tropic of Cancer. His affair with Anaïs must have influenced him creatively:
“I came away with pieces of you sticking to me; I am walking about, swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous […] I can’t picture you moving about with him as you did with me. Legs closed. Frailty. Sweet, treacherous acquiescence. Bird docility. You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old—you are a thousand years old.
Here I am back and still smouldering with passion, like wine smoking. Not a passion any longer for flesh, but a complete hunger for you, a devouring hunger. I read the paper about suicides and murders and I understand it all thoroughly. I feel murderous, suicidal. I feel somehow that it is a disgrace to do nothing, to just bide one’s time, to take it philosophically, to be sensible. Where has gone the time when men fought, killed, died for a glove, a glance, etc?”
Okay, maybe some of this would be a little too intense to say to your loved one on Valentine’s. Don’t quote it verbatim. But the language used in this passage is delicious – describing an intoxicating love and feeling in awe of this woman’s power.
