Letter collections (American Philosophical Society)
During the 18th century, when the novel first originated, letter writing was a consuming passion. In fact, that period has been called the "golden age" of letter writing. Because of changes in the Postal Code in England, everyone could afford to send a letter. And letter writing was the only way to communicate long distance. Therefore, learning how to properly write a letter was a part of any young man's or woman’s education.
Letters were incredibly important. They were sent for the same reasons that we send letters, emails, and texts today—to conduct business, share news with friends and family, and share information or ask questions about various topics. Letters could also serve as a means of introduction to someone whom you’d never met.
However, in the 18th century, letter writing and learning how to write letters was much more formal than it is today. The tone of a letter and what was considered appropriate to write in a letter depended on who you were writing to and why. You would not write the same letter to your mother as you would to a business partner. This is still true today, but we no longer formally learn the etiquette of writing letters the way they did in the 18th century. Eighteenth-century letter writing manuals provided sample letters for a variety of situations. Copying these sample letters allowed a person to practice letter writing and learn appropriate letter-writing manners.
Letter collections (American Philosophical Society
Ever try to write an email to someone, only to revise it several times and worry over the appropriate tone of voice or the content? Ever worry about how to address a letter or email -- should it be to Dr., Mr., Mrs., Ms., Mx., or Miss? 18th-century folks worried about that, too. In fact, one letter writing manual stated, “Many being at a Loss how to address Persons of Distinctions either in Writing or Discourse, are frequently subject to great Mistakes in the Stile and Title due to Superiors.” It then included a very detailed list of how to address a letter, whether you were addressing the King or a merchant.
Be careful though—in the 18th century, if you wrote a letter to a well-known person with a detailed address, they might be offended. Mail carriers should well know how to find “Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia” without his specific address! After all, “In directing your Letters to Persons who are well known, it is best not to be too particular, because it is lessening the Person you direct to, by supposing him obscure, and not easily found.”
These days, we are expected to use specific addresses when sending a letter, but that was not common practice in the 18th century before standard street numbers and zip codes. Luckily we no longer have to worry about that particular faux pas.
Letter collections (American Philosophical Society)
Benjamin Franklin, an expert letter writer, owned a manual titled The Art of Letter-Writing. A scroll through the contents will give you a sense of the variety of sample letters and topics. Franklin also published an American edition of George Fisher’s The American Instructor, or Young Man’s Best Companion. This book for children included letter writing as an important task a young gentleman had to learn, coming just after learning the alphabet and how to make a pen. It included pages of the alphabet in different scripts for students to practice by copying or tracing. . . . However, while students today often only learn print and cursive (which is increasingly falling out of favor), Franklin's students were encouraged to learn five types of handwriting, and each was used for a different purpose.
Letter collections (Wikipedia)
A letter collection consists of a publication, usually a book, containing a compilation of letters written by a real person. Unlike an epistolary novel, a letter collection belongs to non-fiction literature. As a publication, a letter collection is distinct from an archive, which is a repository of original documents.
Usually, the original letters are written over the course of the lifetime by an important individual, noted either for their social position or their intellectual influence, and consist of messages to specific recipients. After these letters have served their original purpose, a letter collection gathers them to be republished as a group. Letter collections, as a form of life writing, serve a biographical purpose. They also typically select and organize the letters to serve an aesthetic or didactic aim, as in literary belles-lettres and religious epistles.
The editor who chooses, organizes, and sometimes alters the letters plays a major role in the interpretation of the published collection. Letter collections have existed as a form of literature in most times and places where letter-writing played a prominent part of public life. Before the invention of printing, letter collections were recopied and circulated as manuscripts, like all literature.
Letter collections (History.com)
Some people recognized the value of their correspondence and published it themselves. It is evident that other people also recognized the value of this correspondence, since they copied and republished these letters for centuries.
In other cases, the letters are published by heirs, or by the editors of works of a person. For many famous authors, collected works are published that frequently contain their private correspondence.
Epistolary Novel (Oregon State Univ.)
The term "epistolary novel" refers to works of fiction written as letters or other documents. "Epistolary" is simply the adjectival form of the noun epistle, from the Latinized Greek for letter.
The letter as a written genre, of course, predates the novel itself. And so as novels emerged in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, it was not uncommon for authors to include letters as part of their overall narrative. They gave readers a chance to hear from characters in their own voices, adding realism and psychological insight, and they usually advance the plot as well.
The first novel in English composed entirely of letters is usually considered to be Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, published in 1684 and attributed to the versatile playwright and author Aphra Behn. Although Behn's characters are fictional, they were modeled on real-life likenesses. Putting their narrative into the form of letters increased the realism of Behn's account, making readers feel as though they were privy to a secret and private correspondence.
Epistolary Novel (Oregon State Univ.)
But the epistolary novel really came into its own with the immensely popular novels of Samuel Richardson in the mid-18th century: Pamela in 1740 and the even more massive Clarissa of 1748.
The full title of Pamela makes clear both Richardson's intentions and the formal apparatus of the novel: Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, in a Series of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel to Her Parents. In fact, Pamela is often cited as the first English novel, and therefore represents the birth of the genre.
The beautiful young damsel was already a cliché in Richardson's time. But it's the adjective "familiar" that is important here, because it signaled to readers that what followed would be a series of letters concerning a household and its intimate domestic details. So Pamela's letters are familiar not because anyone had read them before (Richardson made them up, after all) but because they were composed in a free informal style suitable for that of a daughter writing her parents.
Epistolary Novel–history
It tells the story of a beautiful 15-year-old maidservant, Pamela Andrews, who goes to work for the country landowner, Mr. B. He repeatedly makes unwanted and inappropriate advances in his attempt to seduce her. She successfully wards them off, while writing letters to her family. Eventually, he sincerely proposes an equitable marriage to her, which she accepts.
Pamela was read by countless individual buyers but also read in groups. An anecdote which has been repeated in varying forms since 1777 described the novel's reception in an English village:
"The blacksmith of the village had got hold of Richardson's novel of Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, and used to read it aloud in the long summer evenings, seated on his anvil, and never failed to have a large and attentive audience. . . . At length, when the happy turn of fortune arrived, which brings the hero and heroine together, and sets them living long and happily . . . the congregation were so delighted as to raise a great shout, and procuring the church keys, actually set the parish bells ringing."
Epistolary Novel–history
Contextually, the novel Pamela was written during a time of great change.
Industrialization vastly increased the number of middle class citizens, which also changed the social dynamic of class. Pamela herself moves "up" in the social classes during the novel.
This middle class was better educated, particularly women, who could read and had the money to purchase books.
Women were also increasingly viewed as intellectual and independent people, not just housewives. They had their own opinions, independent of men.
Pamela represented these changing roles, one reason why it was well received by some, and highly criticized by others.
Epistolary Novel–history
The novel is significant because it described the precarious position of an emotionally fragile and inexperienced young lady who wants to maintain the virtue that her parents and society expect. But she also wants to win the approval of Mr. B, whose manipulations confuse her.
In the novel's second part, Pamela has to acclimate to married life in upper-class society. Richardson maintains a steady theme of social acceptability and moral approval through both parts of the novel.
Where that novel contains almost exclusively only letters from Pamela, the novel Clarissa includes not just her correspondence but also those of the rakish gentleman Lovelace, who pursues her, giving readers two main perspectives on the action of the narrative.
Epistolary Novel (Oregon State Univ.)
In these novels, Richardson perfected a style he called "writing to the moment," in which his characters record their thoughts and actions in what seems to be real time, thus adding further realism, immediacy, and even suspense to the genre.
Richardson's novels were so popular that they created a huge vogue for the epistolary novel. As evidence of its popularity, consider that both the first novel written in Canada--Francis Brooke's The History of Emily Montague, from 1769, and the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy, by William Hill Brown, from 1789, were both epistolary in form.
Now most 18th century epistolary novels feature only one or two letter writers like Richardson's. But a notable exception is a novel published in 1776, Tobias Smollett's The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker. In this epistolary novel, we read letters written by a wide range of characters who are traveling around Britain together.
Epistolary Novel (Oregon State Univ.)
The main letter writer is the patriarch of the family, a Welsh gentleman named Matthew Bramble, but we also read letters from his sister, his niece, his nephew, and his sister's maidservant. Their viewpoints on the same locations and activities are often radically different. Bramble is disgusted by the waters at the spa town of Bath, for example, whereas his niece Lydia finds them charming. And it is up to the reader to decide where the truth lies by carefully comparing and juxtaposing their perspectives.
Ultimately this fractious family is healed only when they leave England altogether for the more hospitable and authentic Scottish sites that make up the latter part of their expedition. At this point, their epistolary perspectives become more harmonized and they head back to their Welsh estate much happier than they were when they began their trip.
From private correspondence written between family members, then, Smollett makes the epistolary novel into a kind of technology for bringing the whole nation together.
Epistolary Novel (Oregon State Univ.)
The epistolary novel fell out of fashion by the start of the 19th century, but there's another famous example of one that really pushes the limits of how the form can operate: Bram Stoker's Dracula of 1897.
The novel is composed of a large assortment of different documents and recordings, including not just letters from characters, but also newspaper clippings, diary entries, dictation cylinders, and telegraphs, the last two representing up-to-the-minute technologies in Stoker's day. The result is not just polyvocal and multimedia but also effectively suspenseful, since the reader, being privy to all of the novel's materials, frequently knows more than any single character and can see what is happening or is going to happen more clearly than they. Stoker, in other words, uses the epistolary form to maximize Gothic terror and suspense.
More recently, emails and texts have begun to make their way into novels. The academic satire Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher, for example, uses letters of recommendation, emails, and other forms of modern communication to paint a very funny picture of a very dysfunctional English Department (one that bears no resemblance whatsoever to our fine institution here at Oregon State University, I should note!)
Epistolary Novel–advantages/disadvantages
Because they are told through letters or diaries, epistolary novels make readers feel closer to the story's characters than would a novel told strictly in first-person narrative.
Although readers are not exactly in the character’s head, they are reading words written just for one or two other people.
Readers are in fact reading a story that has been edited by the fictional people living it. The epistolary novel therefore presents an intimate view of the character’s thoughts and feelings without interference from the author.
The most obvious benefit is therefore character development; the protagonist and supporting cast each has their own distinct voice and personal perspective on the world.
The epistolary novel also has dramatic immediacy as it depicts the shape of events.
Epistolary Novel–advantages/disadvantages
With multiple letter writers, the novel can present these events from several points of view, which adds dimension and verisimilitude (sense of reality) to the story.
With multiple letter writers, the novel can also set an ambiguous mood; readers may wonder who to trust. And they can create an air of gossip and mystery.
That said, maintaining the dramatic structure and making the chronology of the novel clear can be difficult with only letters.
Also focusing on the letters written by one character can restrict the reader's access to other characters.
Because of its focus on the thoughts of the letter writers, this genre paved the way for the psychological novel.
Epistolary Novel–types
Three types:
Monologic includes the letters of only one character
Dialogic, the letters of two characters
Polylogic, with three or more letter-writing characters (The Correspondent and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society)
Epistolary Novel (Smithsonian: National Postal Museum)
One of the main draws of epistolary novels is their capacity for the creation of an intimate space between the characters and the readers. As letters (including modern correspondence) are intended for a particular audience (the recipient of the letter), they are often written in more personal terms.
In fictional letters, authors are able to engage this intimate space by using the personal relationships of the characters to reveal their firsthand experiences and inner thoughts through their correspondence. As letters are usually intended to be a closed communication, the readers are allowed to peer into the relationship created by the author.
The epistolary style then allows the reader to see not only into the personal experience and thoughts of just one character, but potentially of multiple through their exchange.
While the letter format is generally an intimate forum to begin with, some of the epistolary novels are even more personal as a result of the specific audience to whom their letters are intended. The epistolary novels whose letters are written to an ambiguous or imaginary party tend to be even more intimate than those written to friends, family, or partners.
Epistolary Novel (Smithsonian: National Postal Museum)
For example, in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), Walker’s main character, Celie, writes a large number of her letters to God. With God being an unresponsive audience who is already assumed to have omniscient understanding of Celie’s life, she is better able to be considerably candid. Despite the profundity of the abuses Celie endures, she is still able to articulate them as a result of her audience, God.
While epistolary novels that are written between two or more distinct individuals can reveal the personal experiences of the characters through their inherently intimate exchange, the epistolary novels which include pieces written to ambiguous recipients open an even greater space for the reader to gain an intimate understanding of the character.
Epistolary Novel (Smithsonian: National Postal Museum)
Feminism is a theme regularly included in epistolary novels. Of the 92 novels analyzed, approximately 20% from across time included elements of feminism. This theme is complex but relatively new (within the last 100 years or so). For example, in many of the novels dating to the 18th or 19th centuries, simply having a dynamic female character was progressive. For this reason, such novels have been included as abiding by the feminist theme. An example of this is Maria Edgeworth’s Leonora (1806). Edgeworth’s novel follows two strong-willed female characters, Leonora and Olivia, whose deviant opinions on marriage and social norms make this novel stand apart as an early feminist piece.
Epistolary Novel (Smithsonian: National Postal Museum)
Part of the reason that epistolary fiction is likely a good format for the expression of female voices, especially in earlier novels, is due to women’s role in letter-writing culture. In periods where public spaces were considerably dominated by men (such as largely for the centuries preceding the 20th century), women were not able to express their experiences or thoughts with the same freedom as their male counterparts.
While it is important to note that elements of this public space domination by men still exist, women’s place in the public sphere was even more constrained in earlier centuries. And, in light of these public constraints and social taboos, personal interactions were often the space where women could express their personal sentiments.
By this, letters served as a forum for women to communicate their perspective to a friend or relative, without breaking the social norms that regularly kept them from the public arena. Therefore, feminism in early epistolary novels is logical, as women were better able to act as independent and dynamic characters in this format in spite of their marginalized social position.
List of Epistolary Novels
Carrie, Stephen King
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware
Lady Susan by Jane Austen
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
Letters from Skye by Jessica Brockmole
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
Video
18th century letter writing—Jane Austen—Morgan Library
Correspondents
Sybil Van Antwerp (Née Stone)
Daan Van Antwerp—Sybil's husband, once; divorced after the death of their son Gilbert, "Colt"
Two surviving children: Bruce and Fiona
Fiona is an architect, lives overseas, with two children: Charles and Frances
Felix Stone, Sybil’s adoptive brother.
Rosalie Van Antwerp, Sybil’s best friend, married to Lars Van Antwerp, Daan’s brother
Guy Donnelly, judge she worked with her entire career
Harry Landy, one of Sybil’s main correspondents, and a teenager. Harry is the son of James Landy, Sybil’s former associate when she worked with Guy Donnelly.
Theodore Lüdbeck—Sybil's neighbor, a refuge from Germany—widower with a romantic interest in Sybil
Mick Watts, one of Sybil’s love interests
Dezi “DM” Martinelli, son of Enzo Martinelli, treated badly by Guy and Sybil
Basam Mansour, customer service representative at the Kindred Project
Melissa Genet, Dean of English at the University of Maryland, who refuses to allow Sybil to take a course
Henrietta “Hattie” Gleason, Sybil’s biological sister
Next Week,
Discussion of The Correspondent