Astrologer Laura Craig

Venus in Gemini and the Epistolary Novel

Carl Spitzweg “Love Letter”

Venus is moving into Gemini tomorrow, where it will remain for the next four months. Usually Venus moves through the signs fairly quickly, but her stay is being extended this time due to a retrograde (more on that in a later post), so we’ll have plenty of time to get to know her in this new role. For Venus, moving from her home in solid and sensual Taurus to mutable air sign Gemini, is a bit like being jolted awake by an alarm clock. Startling and annoying at first, but soon enough, you’re up and moving. Venus isn’t unhappy here, but she will have to adapt to a different pace and a different way of relating. Connections of the body will now be of the mind. Interactions take place on the intellectual plane, and the brain becomes the erogenous zone. She has entered the swirling, dizzying, stimulating world of thoughts and ideas.

Aptly, this transit is happening at a time when, due to social distancing, physical and in-person interactions are all but prohibited, and so we are adapting our social interactions to virtual platforms and sharing our ideas digitally. But for hundreds of years, people have used letter-writing to form and maintain relationships, and to span distance and separation. It may be a dying art form, but there is a particular intimacy that comes from both reading and writing a letter, that is a perfect illustration of Venus in Gemini. And so I thought, since we’ve got plenty of time with this transit, and most likely won’t be using it for handwriting letters, we could use it for reading about people who did. 

The epistolary novel is one in which the story is told entirely through letters, journal entries or documents. It’s a creative, effective and satisfyingly voyeuristic way of getting inside the minds of the characters and of driving the plot. I’ve curated a list of epistolary novels based on Venus in Gemini through the twelve houses. Find Gemini in your chart, look to the house cusp that falls within it, and then find your recommendation:

1st house: “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl”

2nd house: “Poor Folk” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

3rd house: “Harriet the Spy” by Louise Fitzhugh

4th house: “I Capture the Castle” by Dodie Smith

5th house: “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

6th house: “Book of a Thousand Days” by Shannon Hale

7th house: “Frances and Bernard” by Carlene Bauer

8th house: “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker

9th house: “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis 

10th house: “Up the Down Staircase” by Bel Kaufman

11th house: “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows

12th house: “Griffin and Sabine” by Nick Bantock

Happy reading, and writing!


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