Eva Kyle ran a typing service. She did work for the No-Conscription Fellowship and took BR’s dictation of his book, Roads to Freedom, in the early months of 1918. He annotated a letter from her: “She was an admirable typist but very fat. We all agreed that she was worth her weight in gold, though that was saying a great deal.” Her prison letter to him is clever and amusing. She typed his major prison writings and apologized for the amount of the invoice when he emerged.
This edition of Russell’s prison letters is fully annotated with letter images and reliable texts — the texts edited anew in the case of the few letters already published. The texts are printed as Russell wrote them. There are exceptions for clarity: the expansion of lower-case abbreviations, italics for some logical symbols, italics or quote marks for publications, and correction of misspelled words that aren’t names (mistakes in names can be important). See the textual notes and images for individual letters. Sources are given for the originals of the letters edited here, as well as citations of any previous publications thereof.
There are three frequently appearing bibliographical references: “Papers” is The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell (Routledge, 18 vols. to date); “Auto.”, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 3 vols. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967–69); “SLBR”, The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, ed. N. Griffin, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, 1992, 2001).
Edited by Kenneth Blackwell, Andrew G. Bone, Nicholas Griffin and Sheila Turcon. Arlene Duncan, editorial assistant and typesetter. Student research assistants: Geneva Gillis, Graeme Lavender, Jaskaran Basuita.