Love Letters: Bound in Gold Handcuffs

In the pre-digital age, before email and cell phones, letters carried an importance that few who were not part of those times will understand. The words on these pages between Lee Miller and Roland Penrose carry the nuances and emotions of love and desire, passion and anger in a deeply confidential way.

In the pre-digital age, before email and cell phones, letters carried an importance that few who were not part of those times will understand. The words on the pages of a love letter carry the nuances and emotions of love and desire, passion and anger in a deeply confidential way.

The urgency and the intimacy of the writers can be clearly felt in this collection of letters between Lee Miller, Photographer, and Roland Penrose, Surrealist Artist, as they conduct their long-distance romance. It begins with their meeting in Paris in 1937 and runs to 1939 when Lee Miller left her Egyptian husband Aziz Eloui Bey in Cairo and joined Roland Penrose in London at the start of World War 2.

In this real-life romantic drama, the period and their connections give us a supporting cast that includes Dora Maar and Picasso, Nusch and Paul Eluard, Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst, Ady Fidelin and Man Ray.

The nearly 300 pages of love letters in this book show that as the relationship grew it produced and supported some of the world’s best loved art and photography. The letters have never been published before and have only been read by a handful of people since they were first written.