Letters allowed the correspondents to sustain and intensify closeness during long separations, with written declarations often more direct and vulnerable than their in-person exchanges. The delay and distance of correspondence became a medium that licensed confessions the daily presence of the other might have inhibited.
The attraction between the two women was inseparable from mutual regard for each other's writing, so that praise, critique, and erotic feeling arrived in the same breath. Romantic longing was expressed partly as fascination with the other's mind and work rather than as a feeling separable from it.
One correspondent came to see the other as something to be imaginatively transformed, a presence that could be reworked into a literary character rather than only loved as she was. Loving someone and converting her into a subject for one's writing operated at the same time, blurring companion and raw material.
The two parties wanted different intensities and kinds of closeness at different moments, with one often more guarded or more pursued than the other. The relationship persisted not through matched feeling but through an ongoing, uneven negotiation of how much each would offer and withhold.