The social conditions that female Estonian writers faced at the end of the 19th century were complicated. The royalties paid for literary work were small and society’s conservative notions of gender, which saw the domestic sphere as women’s primary field of activity, limited women’s possibilities for activities outside the home. Yet family circumstances could also significantly affect one’s creative career, as was the case for the writer Elisabeth Aspe.
This article examines letters from the writer Elisabeth Aspe (1860–1927) to the poetess Elise Aun (1863–1932) as sources of literary and cultural history. The oeuvre of both these authors was noteworthy in the context of their time, yet as female writers, their creative career paths were different. The reason for this was the fact that Aspe’s stories were published in newspapers without the author’s name. Her works appeared as a book only years later. The course of Aspe’s life also affected her creative path because for a long time, she had to look after her close relatives who were suffering from tuberculosis and therefore, she had little time for writing.
The motivation for their correspondence was the fact that Elise Aun was the godmother of Elisabeth Aspe’s son Feliks. Their correspondence has survived in one-sided form and is preserved in the Estonian Literary Museum’s Estonian Cultural History Archive. The letters are from the period 1892–1927 and 52 of them are preserved in the Estonian Literary Museum’s Estonian Cultural History Archive’s Elise Aun-Raup collection (Collection 7). There are shorter and lengthier pauses in the correspondence. More active correspondence is from the periods 1902–1903 and 1923–1926. The letters are written on everyday matters, such as the activities of everyday life, housekeeping worries, illnesses and death, shared acquaintances, matters associated with literature and translation, church matters, and other topics.
The letters are from a time when Elisabeth Aspe was not working all that much on her literary creative pursuits because family obligations (caring for close relatives and ill persons, housekeeping) occupied a large part of her time. Moods associated with the illness and death of family members are also reflected in the letters, since Elisabeth Aspe’s nephews, brother-in-law, both sisters, husband, and son Feliks died of tuberculosis in that period. Although looking after her close relatives did not leave Elisabeth Aspe all that much time for creative work, devotion to her close relatives allowed her to allay those difficult losses that she had to endure, even just a little. The letters highlight the everyday life of a female writer, the work of caring, which is unavoidably associated with family life and which women have traditionally done, even at the cost of abandoning the work of her profession.