What is everyone talking about this week: As Valentine's Day beckons, love letters are making a comeback
Young lovers are foregoing expensive gifts and turning instead to quill and paper. Is it a result of the cost-of-living crisis — or something else?
The first billet-doux I ever received came from the boys in Year 3. They’d decided to pose as a girl in our class named Emma, whose beautiful handwriting they’d done a fine job of replicating. I was led to believe that Emma wanted to hold my hand, sit next to me at lunch and perhaps invite me for a playdate after school, so swaggered towards her in the courtyard after reading class to declare that my feelings were mutual and we should get married. She is now and I am not.
With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, one might do well to reacquaint oneself with calligraphy. Whether it’s the cost of living crisis or the cult of ‘authenticity’, couples are turning away from material gifts and rediscovering the joy of love letters. According to Pinterest, an online curation platform allowing users to create moodboards around a certain theme — think of it as the digital equivalent of a scrapbook — the search for images relating to stamps and handwritten letters has shot up by 105% and 45%, respectively. Pinterest is a surprisingly underrated trend forecaster: over the past six years, 88% of its style predictions have come true. Society, it seems, is once more turning to pen and paper as a means of romantic expression.
John Malkovich, as the Vicomte de Valmont, pours over his correspondence with the Marquise de Merteuil in 'Dangerous Liaisons' (1988)
Nowhere is this trend clearer than at Claridge's, where Montblanc is launching a new line of Meisterstück pens this week (the collection is aptly titled 'Romeo & Juliet'). From tomorrow, guests and visitors will head to the newly set-up 'Poet's Corner' in the Art Deco lobby, where Charlie Child — the hotel's newly minted 'poet-in-residence' — will compose complementary love lyrics all week and post them to your beloved. And they said romance was dead!
Charlie Child, Claridge's poet-in-residence, is on hand to pen an ode to your beloved if you happen to feel uninspired
Institutions are picking up on this, too. A new exhibition at the National Archives in Richmond puts on show some of history’s most notorious love letters, including one from Catherine Howard to her paramour Thomas Culpeper that would end up serving as evidence of her infidelity, leading to her execution. Romantic epistles, of course, have been around since time immemorial; during the excavation of Nippur in modern-day Iraq, Victorian explorers unearthed a Sumerian cuneiform terracotta tablet on which were inscribed love lyrics dating back to 2030BC.
Since then, love letters have served as a cornerstone of courtly ritual (a lady and her knight would liaise via handwritten notes), redefined entire kingdoms (Henry VIII’s missives to Anne Boleyn led to the creation of the Church of England) and inspired epistolary novels such as Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which was famously adapted for the silver screen in 1988.
As evidenced by Howard’s demise, however, love letters sometimes cause more trouble than they’re worth. In her case, matters of the heart literally became matters of the head. On Substack, users continue to extol the epistle’s courtly virtues, posting snippets by the genre’s most beloved exponents in the runup to February 14 (‘I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia,’ mused Vita Sackville-West; ‘We get old and get used to each other,’ wrote Johnny Cash to June Carter). Write a love letter, by all means — but be careful what you wish for.
This feature originally appeared in the February 4, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
