#letters from bunny

[theonekierce]

But I held my tongue until we had regained the flat in the cautious manner of our exit, and even there until Raffles rallied me with a hand on either shoulder and an old smile upon his face. “You rabbit!” said he. “Why couldn’t you wait till we got home?” “Why couldn’t you tell me what you were going to do?” I retorted as of yore. “Because your dear old phiz is still worth its weight in innocence, and because you never could act for nuts! -No Sinecure

raffles: is patronising but fond bunny: 🥰💞😘

[teaspoonnebula]

Enjoy receiving emails from besotted biographers about their genius associates?

Then have I got some email bookclubs starting in 2024 for you!

[IMG A cartoon of Holmes and Watson running side by side, dressed in country tweeds. Holmes is pointing. Lettering reads Letters from Watson, the Novels]

Letters from Watson is reading through the Sherlock Holmes short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle throughout 2023.

In 2024 we'll be reading the novels starting January 1st, with A Study in Scarlet. Hold on for more mystery and adventure with the Great Detective and his dashing doctor.

[IMG A cartoon of Raffles and Bunny running side by side, dressed in formal suits and top hats and wearing masks. Raffles is clutching some pearls and has jewels in his pockets. Lettering reads Letters from Bunny]

But perhaps you'd rather take a little trip to the other side of the law?

Letters from Bunny will be reading the Raffles stories by EW Hornung, featuring gentleman thief (and cricketer) AJ Raffles and his burglar companion Bunny Manders, from the Ides of March (March 15th)

[IMG A cartoon of Jeeves and Wooster walking side by side, Wooster dressed in colourful clothes and a boater, Jeeves in a monocrome suit. Lettering reads 'Letters Regarding Jeeves']

For something a little lighter, Letters Regarding Jeeves will be reading the uproarously funny public domain stories featuring chap about town Bertie Wooster and his bulging-brained valet Jeeves, starting February 14th.

Reblogs appreciated to spread the word!

[lettersfrombunny]

Who here likes ✨crime✨??

This Ides of March, make it special by not only stabbing Caesar 23 times, but by robbing from the rich for the sake of the poor. Or, at least, reading gay stories about it.

The Raffles Stories were written by E. W. Hornung in the early 1900s-10s, following the felonious exploits of AJ Raffles and his besotted chronicler, Bunny Manders. You can read all of these excellent stories, conveniently delivered to your email inbox for free, by subscribing to the Letters From Bunny Substack. The first story, The Ides of March will start the series off on, as you may have guessed, March 15th, otherwise known as our favorite Tumblr holiday. More information can be found at the link below:

💎🏏💎

I hope you will consider subscribing if you have not yet. Cheers to the death of Caesar! 🗡️

[posingsodomite]

URGENT MESSAGE: I'm on my knees begging you guys to SIGN UP FOR WHAT MANNER OF MAN before it starts on friday!!! 🙇🙇🙇

look me in the eyes! I'm grasping you urgently by the lapels! it's like if Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde were taking notes from my ao3 bookmarks. it has all the authentically victorian vibes I've never found in queer historical fiction and all the hot gay sex they couldn't put in the real stuff. I wish I could eat it!!

IT HAS:

erotic vampirism

hot priest

catholic guilt

celtic paganism-flavored fantasy vibes

CATHOLIC GUILT

lesbian swashbuckling

did I mention the guilt????

please!! you have to help me! I have a fatal disease and the only cure is more people talking about WHAT MANNER OF MAN ⬇️⬇️⬇️

[yeah-thats-probably-it]

[dathen]

“It might have been Bertie who took all those things from the very start,” suggested the little brute hopefully. “He may be like Raffles.”

“Raffles?”

“He’s a chap in a book who went about pinching things.”

CROSSOVER EVENT

Also obsessed with the origin of the gentleman thief genre being described as “chap who went about pinching things”

[serial-serializednovelreader]

What other novels to your inbox do you recommend? I have done Dracula Daily for years and I want to expand my horizon. War is pretty much the only thing that I don't like. Thanks

Hi!

So funny story, contrary to my username and bio…I have not been keeping up with the classic novels in my emails lately. BUT. That does not mean I don’t have some recommendations for you!

Also, since you did mention you don’t like war, I made sure not to recommend any novels that heavily involve war (War & Peace & Emails, for instance). However, I do know some characters in these recommendations have history with war (e.g. Watson was a war doctor) and I’ve made sure to make mention of that wherever possible. So, I apologize if that comes off as annoying or stating the obvious, I just want you to be fully informed before you read. I’m also listing general content warnings as a rule to inform anyone who might be interested in these Substacks. :)

On to the recommendations!

If you’re looking for mystery…

Learn about the greatest detective of all time from his faithful partner — that’s right! Read Letters from Watson to get the scoop on Sherlock and solve mysteries alongside the legendary duo. I thought this was such a cool concept and I wish I had been able to keep up with it. But it was very fun for the time I did. It goes through the entire chronology of Sherlock stories (which is a lot, by the way) and they just started going through the “more complex cases” (aka, the 4 Sherlock novels) back in January. So, it might be a good time to start! There isn’t war in these cases (at least as far as I know, each email does have a list of content warnings for specifics), but Watson was a war doctor and this does come up frequently, just as a heads up.

If you’re looking for epistolary stories…

Literary Letters takes obscure epistolary novels from the public domain and puts them into your inbox! Right now they’re reading The Sorrows of Young Werther, which is about a guy who’s in love with a girl who’s betrothed to another and writes very passionate letters on the subject.

For a content warning, I’ve included the publisher’s note on this one: “There are passages where the book discusses Werther’s depression, despair, rationalizations for suicide, and the suicide itself at length, so please take whatever precautions you need to read the book safely, which may include buddy reading, mental health breaks, or skipping it altogether.”

So with that being said, the reason I got into this email chain was actually for their first novel they emailed - The Lightning Conductor. I absolutely loved this novel and I heavily recommend going back into the archives to read it and its sequel if you can (that one is in the “Side Stories” archive). It’s a very lighthearted read and a romance, told in epistolary format! Basically, it’s about this smart (yet a bit scatterbrained — not judging, because, same) woman who goes to Europe for the first time and she ends up meeting a gentleman when her car breaks down. Said gentleman is mistaken for a chauffeur and he goes along with it, just because she’s dreamy and he’s already smitten with her. Then there’s her “best guy friend” and her mom trying to throw a wrench in their plans. It’s utter chaos and I love it. I could go on for hours about this novel, but I won’t! I do highly recommended reading it if you ever get the chance.

If you’re looking for a read in verse format…

Check out Divine Comedy Weekly! It’s telling Dante’s Divine Comedy every Tuesday and Thursday. There’s not much to say about this one because I dropped out pretty early in the game, unfortunately. For some reason, stories told in a lyrical/verse format don’t seem to be my thing, but maybe they’re your thing! I think it’s a great concept and for that reason, I will recommend this.

If you’re looking for an all-new read…

North and South by Jane Austen is coming to your inbox this June! It’s apparently a bit like Pride and Prejudice but with the Industrial Revolution and labor relations. I actually just subscribed to this one and I’m excited to see how I enjoy it!

If you’re looking for a long haul read…

Buckle in! It’s time for Whale Weekly! That’s right, you’re in for a THREE YEAR TRIP with this bad boy because Ishmael is emailing you the tale of Moby Dick. Life has gotten in the way and I’ve fallen behind (though this is motivating me to catch up again), but this is actually really good as an email read because this guy goes on so many tangents, it’s more fun for me to absorb his thoughts in spaced out emails, rather than if I tried to read the book.

The memes are very fun with this one, but please keep in mind there is racism and foul language in this, as well as other heavy topics I can’t remember off the top of my head. Also, this does not take place in a war setting, but I do believe some characters have been in war in the past, so that is probably something to keep in mind with this one!

This one is coming to an end fairly soon (I didn’t realize we were on chapter 113/135 OOF), so I don’t know if they’re going to do another round after this or leave it. I imagine it would probably be hard to catch up at this point, but I’m going to link it anyway because I typed all of this up before realizing how far along we were and I do still recommend the read in email format rather than a novel format.

If you’re looking for horror…

I would recommend “The Beetle Weekly”. I wasn’t able to finish this one because LifeTM got in the way, but it is, for sure, one of the reads of all time. Probably the best and worst thing you could read ever tbh. It’s not very enjoyable and I’m not pitching it well at all, but for some reason, I am legitimately recommending this because it is hilarious to read with Tumblr memes by your side. As a heads up, this book does include racism, gore, sexism, transphobia (iirc?) and likely more content warnings I can’t remember. The reason I’m recommending it at all is because it does carry some of the same themes as Dracula and the characters are interesting. Plus, love it or hate it, I reacted while reading this book - a lot. Did I mention I have a bug phobia? Also, fun fact: it was published at the same time as Dracula and was actually MORE POPULAR than Dracula for a while before fading into obscurity.

The only thing is, it did just end last April so you might have to wait until December for it to crawl back into your inbox if you’re interested.

If you’re looking for a thriller…

Jekyll and Hyde Weekly. I absolutely LOVED THIS ONE!!!! Very much vibes of Dracula Daily. Immaculate stuff right there. This one has a lot more comedy than you’d think and was very enjoyable. Content warnings for violence against a child (mentioned, not shown), body horror, and there is one more I can’t say without spoiling the book (feel free to DM me if you’re interested in knowing).

Again, this is pretty short and it’s not currently active; it runs November through January, so that’s when you can look out for it!

I was hoping to recommend some more via a masterlist, I know someone made a post waaay back in 2022 when this serialized email novel thing first got started, but it looks like it got deleted, so if there is a new one, I would love for anyone to share it just for future reference!

I do have a couple of honorable mentions I’ll link that I haven’t read and know next to nothing about, but just so you can have even more recommendations. Please feel free to share your favorites!

[thefisherqueen]

And write he did, a light-hearted letter enough, but full of serious solicitude for me and for my health and prospects; a letter almost touching in the light of our past relations, in the twilight of their complete rupture. He said that he had booked two berths to Naples, that we were bound for Capri, which was clearly the island of the Lotos-eaters, that we would bask there together, "and for a while forget." It was a charming letter. I had never seen Italy; the privilege of initiation should be his. No mistake was greater than to deem it an impossible country for the summer. The Bay of Naples was never so divine, and he wrote of "faëry lands forlorn," as though the poetry sprang unbidden to his pen

So I'm reading Graham's Robb 'Strangers. Homosexual love in the nineteenth century', and gods, this passage has connotations. Quote: "Some form of homosexual community seems to have existed in any city large enough to provide anonymity. In most European and American cities, there was a place or even a district where homosexual men - and, more rare, women - could meet in relative safety: the waterfront in San Francisco, Broadway and Central Park in New York, parks alleyways and toilets in Toronto (from about 1890), Montmartre in Paris, Unter den Linden in Berlin, the Retiro in Madrid, the docks in Barcelona, the Boulevard Ring in Moscow, the quare in from of Copenhagen town hall, about seventeen different places in Amsterdam, and almost everywere in Naples." The gay (and forcefully outed) poet Count von Platen wrote about Naples "where love between men is so frequent that one never expects even the boldest damands to be refused'. Italy, and especially Naples, had such a reputation that queer people used to reference it to for example test the waters in a conversation, or safely advertise in search of potential partners. One could always claim to just talk about the literal place and not mean anything else

[reine-du-sourire]

This is literally the face of Bunny Manders.

[theonekierce]

On the Sunday afternoon I was asleep in my berth, the lower one, when the curtains were shaken by Raffles, who was in his shirt-sleeves on the settee. "Achilles sulking in his bunk!" "What else is there to do?" I asked him as I stretched and yawned. I noted, however, the good-humor of his tone, and did my best to catch it. -The Gift of the Emperor

[calllay]

I'm so enjoying following along with both the Jeeves and Wooster and Raffles and Bunny stories via Substack! I haven't felt an urge to post about them on Tumblr since I'm really enjoying their respective discords, so I wanted to mention it! Trying to get into a new fandom is always intimidating, so I'm really happy with the newsletter setup - each installment automatically creates a space for people who are new to the stories to enjoy and discuss them side by side with people who are experts. And everyone being very nice and thoughtful also helps! If you're intrigued, it's definitely not too late to join in with either. I already knew all about the delights of Jeeves and can't recommend it enough, but I'm currently very intrigued, fascinated, and slightly in love with the wonderful Raffles and Bunny. 🐇

[lettersfrombunny]

I've been collecting my memoirs and my dear friend Dr. Watson has encouraged me to send them out - I'm preparing to begin in 2024. You can subscribe to my publication here. I look forward to having you, dear readers.

[thethirdromana]

Me: There's no way that the Raffles stories can get any more homoerotic, right? There has to be a limit?

Letters from Bunny: Here's 2,000 words on how jealous Bunny is that Raffles is talking to a girl ("that Colonial minx") when they were supposed to be enjoying their lovely romantic cruise together.

[stephensmithuk]

Sent to America for trying to steal cheesecake and apple pies

Looking through the records of the Old Bailey, which I have discussed in some of my LFW and LFB posts, I came across this interesting case from April 1724:

A man was brought up before the court being charged with stealing 3 shillings worth of cakes - specifically 18 cheesecakes and 12 apple pies. It seems from the evidence that the baker had encountered several thefts from his premises and so put a watch to catch the perpetrator.

Cue Henry Millmash, a former employee - hence the dogs ignoring him after initially barking at him, being caught by the other servants, literally with cheesecake in his mouth.

Interestingly the jury knocked the value of the goods down to 10d; which made the matter petty rather than grand larceny. This deliberate reduction of value was commonplace in this era as the value determined whether you would get the death penalty or not.

Millmash was sentenced to transportation and probably ended up in America. Perhaps he has descendants still living there!

[yeah-thats-probably-it]

One of his hands fell kindly on my shoulder, while the other slipped into my overcoat pocket, and I suffered him to deprive me of my weapon without a murmur. Nor was this simply because Raffles had the subtle power of making himself irresistible at will.

You guys, uh, weren’t exaggerating, were you

[dathen]

Blorbo-in-law mention!!