People write letters with the assumption that absence can be atoned for. The closer the correspondents or the more important their communication, the greater skills they must find if the fiction of direct contact is to be maintained. The strong personal letter, with its intimacies and frank exchanges and shared concerns, its sense of thought being generated as though in conversation, is perhaps the kind we now value most.
Vincent O'Sullivan, from the Introduction of 'Katherine Mansfield, Selected Letters'