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Part II: Letters (1887 - 1901) INTRODUCTION
Helen
Keller's letters are important, not only as a supplementary story of her life,
but as a demonstration of her growth in thought and expression--the growth which
in itself has made her distinguished. These
letters are, however, not merely remarkable as the productions of a deaf and
blind girl, to be read with wonder and curiosity; they are good letters almost
from the first. The best passages are those in which she talks about herself,
and gives her world in terms of her experience of it. Her views on the
precession of the equinoxes are not important, but most important are her
accounts of what speech meant to her, of how she felt the statues, the dogs, the
chickens at the poultry show, and how she stood in the aisle of St.
Bartholomew's and felt the organ rumble. Those are passages of which one would
ask for more. The reason they are comparatively few is that all her life she has
been trying to be "like other people," and so she too often describes
things not as they appear to her, but as they appear to one with eyes and ears. One
cause for the excellence of her letters is the great number of them. They are
the exercises which have trained her to write. She has lived at different times
in different parts of the country, and so has been separated from most of her
friends and relatives. Of her friends, many have been distinguished people, to
whom--not often, I think, at the sacrifice of spontaneity--she has felt it
necessary to write well. To them and to a few friends with whom she is in
closest sympathy she writes with intimate frankness whatever she is thinking
about. Her naive retelling of a child's tale she has heard, like the story of
"Little Jakey," which she rehearses for Dr. Holmes and Bishop Brooks,
is charming and her grave paraphrase of the day's lesson in geography or botany,
her parrot-like repetition of what she has heard, and her conscious display of
new words, are delightful and instructive; for they show not only what she was
learning, but how, by putting it all into letters, she made the new knowledge
and the new words her own. So
these selections from Miss Keller's correspondence are made with two
purposes--to show her development and to preserve the most entertaining and
significant passages from several hundred letters. Many of those written before
1892 were published in the reports of the Perkins Institution for the Blind. All
letters up to that year are printed intact, for it is legitimate to be
interested in the degree of skill the child showed in writing, even to details
of punctuation; so it is well to preserve a literal integrity of reproduction.
From the letters after the year 1892 I have culled in the spirit of one making
an anthology, choosing the passages best in style and most important from the
point of view of biography. Where I have been able to collate the original
letters I have preserved everything as Miss Keller wrote it, punctuation,
spelling, and all. I have done nothing but select and cut. The
letters are arranged in chronological order. One or two letters from Bishop
Brooks, Dr. Holmes, and Whittier are put immediately after the letters to which
they are replies. Except for two or three important letters of 1901, these
selections cease with the year 1900. In that year Miss Keller entered college.
Now that she is a grown woman, her mature letters should be judged like those of
any other person, and it seems best that no more of her correspondence be
published unless she should become distinguished beyond the fact that she is the
only well-educated deaf and blind person in the world. |
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