Critical Essays

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Critical Essays
Introduction (Survey of Novels and Novellas)
The epistolary novel, a prominent form among modern fictions, is defined as a novel presented wholly, or
nearly so, in familiar letter form. Its history reaches back to classical literature, taking special inspiration from
the separate traditions of the Roman letter writers Cicero and Pliny, and of Ovid’s Heroides (before 8 c.e.;
English translation, 1567), a series of verse letters celebrating famous heroines of myth. Familiar letters, as
such, developed slowly in a world where literacy was rare; but the epistle, a classic rhetorical form, defined by
the rules of oratory, was a favorite means of expression for many scholars of the European Middle Ages and
Renaissance, yielding learned letters in both prose and verse, most common at first in Latin, then in the
vernacular.

The sixteenth century saw the first dated translation of Ovid’s Heroides into French, in 1500. The midcentury
welcomed with great enthusiasm the first “pure” epistolary novels: Juan de Segura’s Processo de cartas
(1548) and Alvise Pasqualigo’s Delle Lettere amorose (1563). Letters were used as tools in the earliest
modern novels and romances, for they answered the frequent problem of communication between separated
lovers, as well as giving the opportunity to multiply complications and mischances by having letters
discovered by enemies, lost and intercepted, misinterpreted, or received out of time and season. For example,
within the five-volume bulk of Honoré d’Urfé’s pastoral novel L’Astrée (1607-1628; Astrea, 1657-1658),
there are 129 letters that are hidden in hats, stolen, found floating down rivers, or recited from memory.

The seventeenth century in France saw the development of a climate in which letters were one of the most
popular forms of written material. The first printed edition of the letters of Abélard and Héloïse came in 1616,
and the verse translation published in 1678 by Bussy-Rabutin (himself a celebrated social épistolier) was
greeted with great enthusiasm. The collected epistles of Guez de Balzac, first published in 1624, had a great
vogue, with many reprintings and new collections. His popular successor, Victor Voiture, was praised still
more highly for the light tone and grace of his letters. Within the aristocratic salons of the day, the reading of
letters within a circle of friends was a frequent social pastime, and many famous people of the day wrote their
letters in the certainty of their being read to a group rather than kept private. Madame de Sévigné wrote to
such correspondents as her cousin Bussy-Rabutin in the expectation that they would circulate and increase her
reputation as a graceful wit.

Within the salons, expertise in letter writing grew through mutual compliment and criticism, but the
appearance of popular letter manuals offered models to a wider circle of literate people. Jean Puget de la Serre
published his enormously successful Secrétaire de la Cour in 1623 and followed it in 1641 with the Secrétaire
à la Mode. These manuals were translated and reissued through countless numbers of printings, became very
popular in England, inspired a great number of imitations, and had an untold effect on developing popular
epistolary style and thematics. The letter writers, as they offered epistolary models on varied subjects and
occasions, often offered responses as well and built up a series of letters that told the germ of a story. Samuel
Richardson wrote a letter handbook, The Complete Letter-Writer (1741), in which can be found the prototype
for his epistolary novel Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740-1741).

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Familiar letters were regarded as direct transcriptions of events seen or experienced by their writers, and
although the epistles of writers such as Balzac were acknowledged to be polished productions, letters in
general carried the cachet of truth and spontaneity. Thus, arising out of the ferment of epistolary literature, the
early epistolary novelists claimed for their works, as a matter of course, the privilege of historical truth. The
most frequent topos of epistolary novels is the statement that they are a collection of real letters, not literary
fabrications, and that the author is only an editor of material from other hands. The first great French
epistolary novel, Les lettres portugaises (1669; Five Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier, 1678; better
known as The Letters of a Portuguese Nun, 1893), now recognized as the work of Gabriel-Joseph de La
Vergne, was long believed to be a translation from the Portuguese of genuine letters written by a nun to her
French lover. Letters offered a freedom of style, being rhetorically defined as written transcriptions of oral
communication. Letters could deal with a variety of subjects, using a light touch, and were not forced to
follow any subject through all its logical ramifications. Charles de Montesquieu, the author of Lettres
Persanes (1721; Persian Letters, 1722), refers to these advantages of epistolary form in his “Réflections,”
which were added to the 1754 edition. Letters carried the atmosphere of lived experience, which gave
credence and popularity to the memoir but had the added fillip of retelling stories whose ends were unknown.
A memorialist has safely arrived at a point from which he or she can reflect on the past. Letters are written
within the flow of present experience, looking back to the last letter written, forward to the next.

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The Epistolary Novel
Introduction
The Epistolary Novel

A genre of fiction which first gained popularity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the epistolary
novel is a form in which most or all of the plot is advanced by the letters or journal entries of one or more of
its characters, and which marked the beginning of the novel as a literary form.

Epistolary fiction dates back at least to ancient Roman times, but the epistolary novel as a distinct genre first
gained prominence in Britain in the mid-eighteenth century. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, Aphra Behn in Britain and Charles Louis de Montesquieu in France produced works of fiction told
through the medium of letters, but many scholars still regard Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) to be the
first example of the epistolary novel—and indeed the first mature novel to be written in English. Richardson's
ground-breaking work is marked by a coherence of characterization, plot, and theme that had been missing in
earlier fictional efforts, and his use of the epistolary form lends realism, complexity, and psychological
subtlety to his story. The epistolary novel enjoyed its greatest popularity in England and France from the
mid-1700s to the end of the century, a time when literacy was on the increase and the public sought literary
works with more depictions of ordinary experience and greater psychological realism than were found in the
old heroic romances. With its reliance on subjective points of view, the epistolary novel by its very nature
offers intimate insight into characters' thoughts and feelings without interference from the author, and
advances the plot with dramatic immediacy. Epistolary authors commonly wrote about questions of morality,
and many epistolary novels are sentimental in nature. Because of the “private” nature of the form, with the
depiction of domestic and personal concerns, much epistolary fiction was written by or about women, and the
letter-novel was one of the earliest avenues for women writers to achieve public recognition for their art.

Female characters in the novels often wrestle with sexual temptation and moral propriety and find that the
only way to express themselves honestly and thoroughly is by confiding in a trusted friend through letters.
Many critics in Richardson's day regarded the letters he wrote in the voices of his female protagonists to be
the finest expression of feminine concerns and sensibilities of the period. Genuine female voices are also to be
found in the some of the most popular and best-known epistolary novels of the eighteenth century. Mary
Davys, one of the first women to support herself through her writing, produced several epistolary works,
including The Reform'd Coquet: or Memoirs of Amoranda (1724), which tells of the “taming” of Amoranda,
a good but flighty young woman, and Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady (1725), a satire about
politics and women's place in society. Fanny Burney's Evelina: or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance
into the World (1778) is a novel of manners that explores a young, innocent woman's entrance into society.
Marie-Jeanne Riccobini's highly successful Les Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd (1757), an exchange of
letters between a simple young Englishwoman and her aristocratic lover, makes clear the division between
private and public spheres that were a feature of women's social reality in the eighteenth century. Many
women writers of the period in their novels point out women's exclusion from public matters, and often their
female characters seek to transcend social barriers by making their own autonomous decisions.

While women novelists were certainly read during the eighteenth century, the bias prevailed that serious
literary work was conducted by men. The acknowledged great British epistolary novelists of the period
included Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollet. Richardson had enjoyed a career as a successful
printer, and was asked to compose a guide to letter writing. He worked around a central theme and the result
was his moral novel Pamela: or, Virtue Unrewarded, the story of a servant girl's victorious struggle against
her master's attempts to seduce her. The work was an unprecedented popular and critical success and spawned
dozens of imitations and burlesques, the best-known of which was Fielding's An Apology for the Life of Mrs.
Shamela Andrews. Fielding with his parody points out some of the inherent problems with the epistolary

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form, including the fact that simple, uneducated characters convey their sentiments through sophisticated
literary means. Still, Richardson continued to favor the form, declaring that it was much better suited to
realistically portraying the lives and dilemmas of characters than straightforward narrative fiction. The fact
that the important and well-respected novelist Tobias Smollet, who had already achieved fame with his
narrative fiction, turned to the epistolary form with The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) indicates the
popularity of the genre in England in the last decades of the eighteenth century.

Fiction told through the medium of letters was also popular on the European continent, and by the
mid-sixteenth century in Spain and Italy letters were often used to tell stories of the trials of illicit and
prohibited love. Over the next 150 years, letter-writing became increasingly popular in travel books, news
stories, and published personal correspondences. The rise of the epistolary novel as a form on the continent
roughly parallels its development in England. Charles Louis de Montesquieu's 1721 Lettres persanes and
Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, fils's 1735 Lettres de la Marquise de M*** au Comte de R*** lacked the
realistic novelistic structure and complexity of Richardson's fiction, but those works certainly influenced
Richardson as well as later French epistolary writers. Some of the great French epistolary novels in the
eighteenth century include Jean-Jacques Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Choderlos de Laclos'
1782 Les Liaisons dangereuses. These novels, like their English counterparts, are redolent with sentimental
romance and melodrama, and a great deal of attention is paid to questions of morality. Several popular but
little-remembered epistolary novels appeared in the United States at the end of the century, just as the greatest
vogue of the genre was past in Europe and Britain. As the century drew to a close the novel letter as a form
had fallen into disfavor, as readers and writers of popular fiction increasingly turned to Gothic romances, and
serious novelists, too, adopted the more straightforward narrative form.

Representative Works
Anonymous
Olinda's Adventures: Or the Amours of a Young Lady 1693

Frances Burney
Evelina: or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World 1778

Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, fils

Letters from the Marchioness de M*** to the Count de R*** 1735

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur

Letters from an American Farmer 1782

Mary Davys
The Reform'd Coquet: or Memoirs of Amoranda 1724
Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady 1725
The Accomplish'd Rake: or a Modern Fine Gentleman 1727

Henry Fielding
An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews [Shamela] 1741

Choderlos de Laclos
Les liaisons dangereuses [Dangerous Liaisons] 1782

Charles Louis de Montesquieu

Lettres persanes [Persian Letters] 1721

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Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni
Les Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd 1757

Samuel Richardson
Pamela: or, Virtue Unrewarded 1740
Clarissa: or the History of the Young Lady 1747
History of Sir Charles Grandison 1750

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
La Nouvelle Héloïse 1761
Letters of an English Nun and an English Gentleman 1781

Tobias Smollett
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker 1771

Criticism: Overviews And General Studies

Godfrey Frank Singer (essay date 1933)
SOURCE: “Epistolary Fiction (Particularly the Novel) in France and in Italy,” in The Epistolary Novel: Its
Origin, Development, Decline, and Residuary Influence, Russell & Russell, 1963, pp. 181-94.

[In the following excerpt from a work originally published in 1933, Singer examines the popularity of the
epistolary genre in France, Italy, and Germany, countries whose works he says most critics neglect because
of the prominence of Samuel Richardson and other English authors.]

The casting of narrative works of fiction, which we have designated novels, into epistolary form, was a
practice by no means limited to the land which gave the greatest examples of the art any more than it was to
the century which produced its most distinguished proponents and in which the mode reached its highest peak
of development and achievement. Novels were written in this form by French, Italian, American, German,
Russian, and other authors. In Brian W. Downs' book on Samuel Richardson, there is included a chapter on
“The Consequences of Richardson,” 1 wherein Mr. Downs has included a list of novels in letter form in
various other literatures in Europe. He has, however, omitted America from his census, and has treated
epistolary fiction in Italy rather slightingly. It may be argued, of course, that the use of this form was not a
“consequence” of Richardson, or that Richardson did not introduce into Italy the novel in letters, although
admittedly he made it fashionable there. But when one considers the epistolary epidemic, as it may be termed,
and sees the germinal poste restante marked “England” and knows further than that that Richardson connotes
the word “epistolary” in England, one can well feel that he is not jumping to conclusions rashly in ascribing
to Richardson the impulse giving strength to the novel in letters and its imitators in England and outside
England.

If one were anxious to investigate the subject of the epistolary novel in France completely, the compass of a
volume would be necessary. Aside from those works listed by Mr. Downs in his aforementioned chapter, M.
Philippe Van Tieghem's edition of La Nouvelle Héloise; ou Lettres de deux Amants habitans d'une petite Ville
au pieds des Alps, of Rousseau (first exposed for sale in 1761 in Paris), contains the best list collected in one
spot convenient to the finger tips.

In 1751, three years after its appearance in England, Clarissa appeared in French as Lettres Angloises ou
Histoire de Clarissa Harlove. In 1755-56 we may note the appearance in French of Nouvelle Lettres Angloises
ou Histoire de Chevalier Grandisson. These translations are both attributed to Abbé Prévost, the author of
Manon Lescaut. As early, however, as 1742, there is noted a work which shows that Pamela had already made
its mark upon the French literary consciousness, for Antipamela; or Mémoires de M.D.—appeared at this time,
published in London. In 1743, Anti-Pamela; or, Feign'd Innocence Detected: In a Series of Syrena's