HEAVEN HAS NO rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned," wrote William Congreve in The Mourning Bride, in 1697.

If you require proof of the playwright's judgment, read the letters women write - and it is almost always the woman who writes - when love sours.

Author Anna Holmes has collected some of these letters in a book with a familiar title: Hell Hath No Fury: Women's Letters from the End of the Affair.

She has included missives written as far in the past as Anne Boleyn's protestation of her innocence to Henry VIII on the eve of her execution in 1536, and as recently as "Tanya's" vicious Internet posting to "Ryan" in 2000.

For the record, none of my vicious farewells survive. But the one that Holmes wrote to Arthur, a guy who stood her up twice, was the genesis for this book.

After editing out the comments about his mother and his substance abuse and the reference to a mugging he suffered as divine justice, she punched SEND and e-mailed the letter to Arthur.

She then punched SEND again, and sent it to all her closest friends.

"My letter wasn't even that good, but at the time I was proud of it," says Holmes, who includes it in this collection.

"It was cathartic. I was very angry, and I didn't think I could communicate with him in any other way."

Urged by friends to undertake a collection of such letters, Holmes uncovered some gems, including a previously unpublished letter from poet Sylvia Plath to childhood friend and, briefly, lover Philip McCurdy, asking that they return to being platonic friends.

Holmes, a free-lance magazine writer living in New York, did her much of her research scouring hundreds of books of letters, but she also cross-referenced biographical information with the dates of original letters held in archives in North America and Europe.

Among her favorites, she says, were the "Dear John" letters she gathered from soldiers after advertising for them in veterans magazines.

"Most of the collections of military letters are missing these kinds of letters. They say they were always destroyed by the soldiers.

"But I got responses from 80-year-old men who had saved their 'Dear John' letters from 1944. I am the most proud of finding those letters."

She collected contemporary letters by ingeniously e-mailing her request to women who had posted Internet reviews of chick movies, chick books and chick music.

It didn't surprise Holmes that these women had saved copies of the letters they had written at the end of affairs.

"I think these women were proud of themselves for what they wrote at the time, and they saved them so that could look back on them. Perhaps when they were feeling angry all over again and needed to re-read what they had said."

There is plenty of buzz about this book, and Holmes knows that its success will undoubtedly generate a publisher's demand for a second book, perhaps containing the letters men write at the end of an affair? But she thinks such a collection would be as thin as a church bulletin.

Whether it is a go-to-hell letter or a what-went-wrong letter, it is women who seem to need to document the end of an affair.

"Women are afraid of their feelings of anger," Holmes says, "and a letter is a much safer way for [them] to express it.

"Men don't have a history of using the written word to express their feelings like women do. You know, diaries and journals - that's what women do.

"And I don't think [men] think it is worth the trouble to acknowledge the end of a romance in this formal way."

Holmes also has a theory that women, socialized since girlhood to put the needs of others first, are more likely to lose themselves in an affair and are left adrift when it is over.

"Writing a letter like this is a way to reclaim that lost part of yourself," she says. "Sort of like saying, 'This is what happened and this is what I think of it.' It is a way to reclaim some kind of power over what happened to you."

While looking for a student to help research the book, Holmes walked into a college English department in New York to post a flier.

There was Arthur, the recipient of her own break-up letter. Though shaken, Holmes was relieved to realize she hadn't actually thought about the guy for months.

"He didn't inspire this book. I wouldn't want him to be that flattered. He isn't a tragic figure who haunts me to this day or anything," she says.

"Who knows? Maybe this book is the ultimate break-up letter."