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Alys Faiz’s letters to her husband were published in book form, so they are not literally private or unpublished. The sharper question is why, despite that availability, they can still seem confined to selective literary and cultural settings. In her 2017 essay, Farha Noor argues that Alys’s writing circulates in a narrow critical space, and that staged readings can turn the letters into “privately read public texts.” That is Noor’s interpretation, not a measured finding about every reader or performance.
Published letters, limited circulation
Alys wrote to Faiz during his imprisonment from 1951 to 1955. Her collection, Dear Heart: To Faiz in Prison, was published by Ferozsons in Lahore in 1985; an updated edition followed in 2016. The publication history matters: the letters were available to readers decades before Noor’s essay, even if publication alone did not ensure wide circulation.
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Noor’s criticism is about the gap between availability and reach. She points to readings at elite cultural gatherings in Karachi, Lahore, New Delhi and London, and argues that these settings risk keeping Alys’s writing within a narrow critical and social sphere. The sources establish that the book was published and that performances took place; they do not provide audience counts, sales figures or representative readership data. “Elite” is therefore Noor’s diagnosis of the settings and their limits, not a documented description of every audience.
Why the letters are more than private correspondence
Noor places Alys within progressive political and literary circles and describes how Faiz’s imprisonment left her managing family life while writing to him. The letters were in English and, according to Noor, were scrutinised by jail authorities before delivery. In that account, correspondence between spouses also took place under state surveillance.
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The exchange addresses separation, marriage and family, but Noor also draws attention to its political and social concerns. She cites Alys writing about the effects of imprisonment on ordinary people and the unmet need for a village school. That combination makes the letters legible as both intimate writing and social observation: their personal form does not limit their subject matter to the couple.
Noor’s broader point is that women’s writing can be narrowed by the ways it is classified and presented. When Alys is encountered mainly through selected readings, she may appear as a figure in Faiz’s story rather than as a writer whose work engages politics, everyday life and women’s experience. The letters’ performance can bring them to an audience, but the format alone does not establish how widely they travel beyond the event.
How the two sides of the correspondence were published
The publication histories of Alys’s and Faiz’s letters are distinct. A 2013 report says Faiz’s English prison letters were published in Two Loves in 2011, while Alys’s letters had appeared in Dear Heart in 1985. That report also says some of Faiz’s English letters were lost to termites. Salima Hashmi later described the family finding letters after Alys’s death and working to preserve and publish them. These accounts show different routes into print, not a simple claim that one spouse’s correspondence was published and the other’s was not.
From book to stage
Staged readings are one way the exchange has reached audiences. The News reported on a Zambeel Dramatic Readings presentation in 2013, and Dawn covered an Ajoka Theatre performance based on the couple’s correspondence in 2016. A performance makes the letters audible and immediate, but its existence does not prove either broad access or exclusion; the available reporting does not quantify who attended.
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The chronology is clear enough to distinguish publication from performance:
| Year | Documented milestone |
|---|---|
| 1985 | Dear Heart: To Faiz in Prison, 1951–1955 published by Ferozsons in Lahore; catalogued by WorldCat and recorded by Google Books. |
| 2011 | Faiz’s English prison letters published in Two Loves, as described in The News. |
| 2013 | The News reports on a staged reading of the correspondence by Zambeel Dramatic Readings. |
| 2016 | Dawn reports on an Ajoka Theatre performance; Sang-e-Meel lists an updated edition of Dear Heart, issued with Faiz Foundation Pakistan and Faiz Ghar. |
| 2017 | Farha Noor’s Scroll.in essay makes the argument about narrow circulation and elite readings. |
What the evidence can—and cannot—establish
Noor’s essay is the source for the claim that these readings are elite and that Alys’s writing remains outside a broader public reach. The event reports corroborate that staged readings occurred; they do not independently establish the class composition of their audiences. The sources reviewed also give no audience totals, readership survey, book sales or circulation figures. A defensible answer is therefore that Noor sees a narrow mode of circulation, not that the letters are universally inaccessible or that every performance is exclusive.
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Noor also identifies Alys’s memoir Over My Shoulder and columns in Pakistan Times, Viewpoint and She as other routes into her writing. They point to a broader body of work than the letters alone, though the cited account does not independently examine those publications.
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