The Journal to Stella is a book which contain various letters of Jonathan Swift. When Swift began to write the letters known as the Journal to Stella, he was forty-two years of age, and Esther Johnson twenty-nine. Perhaps the most useful introduction to the correspondence will be a brief setting forth of what is known of their friendship from Stella's childhood, the more specially as the question has been obscured by many assertions and theories resting on a very slender basis of fact.