Last year was the first calendar year to exceed the threshold
In September 1950, as de Beauvoir made her way back to Paris after seeing Algren, she had sensed that his feelings for her had cooled.
Feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and Chicago writer Nelson Algren met in 1947, and quickly sparked a transatlantic love affair.
"I am not sad. Rather stunned, very far away from myself, not really believing you are now so far, so far, you so near." She wrote, "So, I'll wait. When you'll wish it, just tell. I shall not assume that you love me anew, not even that you have to sleep with me, and we have not to stay together such a long time, just as you feel, and when you feel. But know that I'll always long for your asking me."
"In order that you won't think me a complete boor, I am writing you this letter to explain that because of an erratic, flighty, fly-by-night, temperment I wish not to humiliate and degrade your sentiments by seeing you only at my mood's conveinence. Please accept this letter with an open heart as it is written with fourthright sincerity. I’m sorry I could not have tried harder to be less self indulgent and theirwith, a little more compatable."
Wharton continued: "My life was better before I knew you. That is, for me, the sad conclusion of this sad year. And it is a bitter thing to say to the one being one has ever loved d’amour."
Baldwin accused her of being jealous, and Nin considered him extremely insecure, both as an artist and as a man. "Going out with you was like going out with a priest," Nin wrote in a letter from August 25, 1945.
Sources: (Mental Floss) (Stylist)
In early 1897, Oscar Wilde was completing the end of his two-year prison sentence for gross indecency (i.e. having relationships with men). While locked up, Wilde wrote a 55,000-word letter to his lover, Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, who hadn't kept up correspondence with him during his incarceration.
French author Anaïs Nin and poet C.L. "Lanny" Baldwin were both married when they began an affair in 1944, but by late summer the following year it had started to go down hill.
Two of Hollywood's biggest stars met and fell in love on the set of 'Cleopatra' (1963), when both were married to other people. Their affair caused an international scandal, which led to a decade-long, tumultuous relationship in the spotlight.
For years, Douglas claimed that he didn't know about Wilde's prison letter. Upon his release, Wilde turned it over to his friend Robert Ross with instructions to make a copy and send the original to Douglas. According to Douglas, Ross never did. But what Ross did do was publish excerpts from the letter several years after Wilde's death under the title 'De Profundis.'
With a mixture of pain, bewilderment, and denial, Wilde wrote, "Your pale face used to flush easily with wine or pleasure. If, as you read what is here written, it from time to time becomes scorched, as though by a furnace-blast, with shame, it will be all the better for you."
"I shall miss you with passion and wild regret," he wrote. "You may rest assured that I will not have affairs with any other female. I shall gloom a lot and stare morosely into unimaginable distances and act a bit, probably on the stage, to keep me in booze and butter, but chiefly and above all I shall write." They officially divorced in 1974, but remarried in 1975 and then got divorced again less than a year later.
After Taylor broke things off, Burton immortalized his reaction in a letter dated June 25, 1973. "You’re off, by God! I can barely believe it since I am so unaccustomed to anybody leaving me. But reflectively I wonder why nobody did so before."
Despite the letter, the two didn't cut ties after Kahlo's operation, and they stayed together until her death in 1954.
"Let's not fool ourselves, Diego, I gave you everything that is humanly possible to offer and we both know that. But still, how the hell do you manage to seduce so many women when you're such an ugly son of a b?" She continued, "I'm writing to let you know I'm releasing you, I'm amputating you. Be happy and never seek me again."
In March 1796, she wrote him: "You must do as you please with respect to the child. I could wish that it might be done soon, that my name may be no more mentioned to you. It is now finished." She continued, "I now solemnly assure you, that this is an eternal farewell."
In 1953, Frida Kahlo was finishing a letter in a hospital bed before doctors amputated her gangrene-infected leg. She was writing to her husband, Diego Rivera, who had carried on affairs, including with Kahlo's sister Cristina, throughout their relationship. However, Kahlo had also been unfaithful to him.
Before Mary Wollstonecraft married William Godwin and gave birth to future 'Frankenstein' author Mary Shelley, she had a daughter with Gilbert Imlay, an American author and diplomat. They never married, and his constant absence, infidelity, and bad treatment of her eventually ended the relationship.
In one letter from January 20, 1947, she wrote: "I've always thought of being in love as being willing to do anything for the other person, starve to buy them bread and not mind living in Siberia with them, and I've always thought that every minute away from them would be hell, so looking at it that [way] I guess I'm not in love with you."
Soon after meeting they started a relationship, but Brando ended it in the late '40s via a three-page letter, which included a few spelling mistakes.
During the mid-1940s, a teenaged Jackie Bouvier dated a Harvard University student named R. Beverley Corbin Jr. In her letters to him, she shared her feelings about boarding school, which she hated, and also how she came to realize she didn't actually love him.
In April 1910, 'The Age of Innocence' (1920) author Edith Wharton penned a "What are we?" letter to her on-again, off-again beau, journalist W. Morton Fullerton.
Their story is shown in the 1996 film 'In Love and War,' where von Kurowsky is portrayed by Sandra Bullock and Hemingway is played by Chris O'Donnell.
Solange Podell was a French actress and cabaret dancer who met Marlon Brando in 1947 backstage after a Broadway performance of 'A Streetcar Named Desire.' Brando was playing Stanley Kowalski, a role he'd reprise for the 1951 film adaptation.
She wrote on March 7, 1919: "I know that I am still very fond of you, but, it is more as a mother than as a sweetheart. It's alright to say I'm a Kid, but, I'm not, and I'm getting less and less so every day. I tried hard to make you understand a bit of what I was thinking on that trip from Padua to Milan, but, you acted like a spoiled child, and I couldn't keep on hurting you. Now, I only have the courage because I'm far away." Hemingway was 19 years old and von Kurowsky was 26.
The inspiration for the romance in Ernest Hemingway's 'A Farewell to Arms' (1929) was his own affair with Agnes von Kurowsky, a Red Cross nurse he met while recovering from a shrapnel injury in Milan, Italy, during World War I. When he had returned to the US to find them a home, von Kurowsky sent him a breakup letter where she confessed that she probably never had been in love with him.
"I don't know what you want, or what I am! You write to me like a lover, you treat me like a casual acquaintance!" she wrote. "I have borne all these inconsistencies and incoherences as long as I could, because I love you so much, and because I am so sorry for things in your life that are difficult and wearing … Only now a sense of my worth, and a sense also that I can bear no more, makes me write this to you. Write me no more such letters as you sent to me in England."
Jackie kept up correspondence with Corbin after that, but the relationship eventually fizzled out. Later, she got engaged to stockbroker John Husted Jr., but ended things with him after a few months. Shortly after, she tied the knot with John F. Kennedy in 1953.
They wrote the most memorable breakup letters in history
Some famed breakups were immortalized in writing
LIFESTYLE Relationships
Forget the modern-day cowardice of ghosting: breakups are best handled with verve and courage! While countless breakups are forgotten, many others have been immortalized in writing. Sure, no one loves ending a relationship, but these letters show that gentle phrases and piercing metaphors can make the process easier (or harder) on the ex-lover-to-be. From Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, click on for some of the most memorable breakup letters in history.