Comment by tkgally

This reminded me of something the historian Megan Marshall wrote in the introduction to her book The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (2005):

“I became expert in deciphering the sisters’ handwriting, and that of their ancestors, parents, and friends. Each era and each correspondent presented different challenges. Some hands were sprawling, some spindly, some cramped; t’s went uncrossed at the ends of words, and f’s and s’s were interchanged; spelling, capitalization, and punctuation could be erratic or idiosyncratic. Often, to save paper and postage, the sisters turned a single sheet ninety degrees and wrote back across a page already covered with handwriting. I learned to be especially attentive to these cross-written lines, in which the sisters invariably confided their deepest feelings in the last hurried moments of closing a letter. Here I would find the urgent personal message that had been put off for the sake of dispensing news or settling business. In one such postscript, I discovered Elizabeth’s account of a conversation with Horace Mann in which the two spoke frankly of their love for each other and finally settled on what it meant.”

A photograph of a letter with cross-writing is here:

https://www.masshist.org/database/1774

Marshall wrote more in an article for Slate:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2005/05/reading-the-peab...