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The place love tries to make, and the place it is exiled from.

• High Roman Empire

  The Empty Threshold

  She is in Campania for her health. He rereads her letters, walks to the room where she sat, and writes as if the wax could keep her. Her side of the correspondence does not survive.

• Heian Japan

  A Gossamer Life

  A wife in a polygamous Fujiwara marriage keeps a record of being left to wait. The diary is not a romance of patience. It is what neglect looks like from inside the house.

• Ireland and Wales, late Georgian

  Plas Newydd

  Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby left Ireland in 1778 and kept a household in Wales for fifty years. They used the language of friendship. Do not force a modern label as the only truth. Do not deny the intimacy.