Carrie’s love letters book turned into the reel deal

IT WAS billed the chickflick of the year but ironically, Sex and the City sent thousands of women to the classical section of their local bookshop, seeking out a collection of historic letters that didn’t exist.

Such was the interest in lead character Carrie’s fictional book Love Letters from Great Men that Macmillan publishers decided that the public must get what the public want.

And so, a collection of letters from Byron, Beethoven, Henry VIII and Robert Browning was born — a collection that may very well find itself in the unlikeliest of homes.

“As a result of the film, bookshops were inundated with customer requests for the book that didn’t actually exist. Hearing about the sudden demand for this book, Jenny Geras, head of online marketing, came up with the idea to create it and it has been put together, with brief and witty introductions to each letter writer,” said Sophie Portas of Pan Macmillan.

The new book is unashamedly commercial. “Just look at its cover. It’s much more mainstream that such a collection would be normally,” she said.

The letters that Carrie read out to Mr Big, in the hope he might discover some inner romantic expressiveness, were real enough, they just hadn’t been put together in an anthology yet.

In the movie, Carrie reads out Beethoven’s letters to an “immortal beloved” while the anthology also showcases Robert Browning’s appeals to Elizabeth Barrett, who was imprisoned in her father’s home. William Congreve talks of love as a “delicious poison” while Charles Darwin depicts it as “a nice soft wife on a sofa, with good fire and books and music”.

The father of romantic expressiveness, Flaubert, speaks of love as penetrating “one’s heart like cooling rain”.

Sex and the City, the TV series, was built on Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte’s beliefs that thirtysomething women mustn’t drop standards when looking for a man.

Discarding bad dates like used tissue boxes, they were widely seen as striking a blow for the modern-day singleton — their men, and so all men, had to up their game.

The resurgent love letter is just the next instalment in the “make men feel inadequate” campaign. Pity those men trying to get some kip while the woman beside them (like Carrie) reads aloud in the hope of waking his “romantic expressiveness”. Famous love letters

“Under what star were you born, pray, to unite in your person such diverse qualities, so numerous and so rare?”

— Gustave Flaubert to George Sand

”Even covered with mud I shall praise you, from the deepest abysses I shall cry to you. In my solitude you will be with me. I am determined not to revolt but to accept every outrage through devotion to love, to let my body be dishonoured so long as my soul may always keep the image of you. From your silken hair to your delicate feet, you are perfection to me”

— Oscar Wilde writing to Lord Douglas

“I have not spent a day without loving you; I have not spent a night without embracing you; I have not so much as drunk one cup of tea without cursing the pride and ambition which force me to remain apart from the moving spirit of my life. In the midst of my duties, whether I am at the head of my army or inspecting the camps, my beloved Josephine stands alone in my heart, occupies my mind, fills my thoughts”

— Napoleon Bonaparte to Josephine de Beauharnais.