“Dear Reader”: A new blog series on the epistolary novel
I’ve been immersed in 19th century Britain for much of the American 21st Century—researching my Regency-era novels, binge-watching BBC historical dramas, and analyzing the stories of Sherlock Holmes and novels of Anthony Trollope. As a reader and as a novelist, I’m especially drawn to the 19th Century because that was the time when the novel developed into the predominant fictional form (until quite recently when Netflix overwhelmed storytelling, but of course, most of those series are based on novels). I’m fascinated by novel structure, because it is quite a feat to develop multiple characters and plotlines over 300 pages or more. And in the 19th Century, novelists were quite experimental—certainly as much, and to better effect IMHO, than the postmodernists of our own time. One of the first and still greatest of the experimental forms was the epistolary or ‘letter’ novel.
The first “novel” in English—that is, a long narrative in prose form—was probably Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which was more a collection of “campfire tales” told by pilgrims. It was another 300 years before the novel really developed in England (there was that little digression into Shakespearian drama first). By the 17th Century, as literacy became more common there and printed books became more affordable, the tale-telling narrator emerged in a new way. Some of the earliest novels (including those of Richardson and Defoe) were partly or completely epistolary, that is, based around a series of fictional “epistles”– letters or journal entries. That’s probably because even new readers—like the newly literate middle class– were used to reading actual letters and diaries, and so the epistolary format wasn’t such a jolt. And for authors, it must have felt natural to write as their characters in first-person point of view (POV) because they were used to that approach in their own letters.
Early novelists could also draw on the non-personal narrative poem format, so a novel like Behn’s Love Letters of a Nobleman to His Sister had both a long exchange of letters between the nobleman and his wife’s sister, but also extended passages of narrative which related action not confined to that described in the letters. Already POV was used fluidly– the letters were in first-person POV, while the narrative is in a third-person omniscient POV. Behn made good use of the contrast, letting her two lovers indict themselves in their own written correspondence as vain, shallow, and in love with love.
Samuel Richardson exploited both familiar forms of letters and journal to fascinating effect in Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). The first part of the novel consisted of letters written by a 15-year-old housemaid to her parents. Then, when her rapacious employer holds her captive in a remote estate, she switches to writing in a secret journal.
As Pamela shows, what distinguishes the epistolary novel from a more conventional first-person narration is the fictional notion that the narrative is aimed at particular readers and is written for some purpose. In standard first-person narration, there’s seldom a clear purpose or a specific reader for the narrator’s narration– for some reason, he’s just telling his story out loud. But in an epistolary, the letters supposedly are meant to be read by their recipients, and the diary entries are presumably meant to be read over by the narrator/journal-writer and no one else. So there’s (fictionally) a specific purpose for the narrator in narrating these events– either to explain them to the letter recipients or to record them for her own later review. For instance Pamela hopes that if her evil employer kills her, her parents will eventually be able to read the journal to learn about her fate. (Horrifically, the “happy ending” is that her employer eventually finds the journal, and after reading her harrowing account, repents of his evildoing and proposes marriage. Wedding bells! In a future post, I’ll tell you about the wild and shocking public response to poor Pamela’s account, and how it started a famous literary feud.)
If you’ve read some epistolary novels, you’ve probably noticed that they often have different “frames” or concepts. Some are letters, some are diaries, some are mixed-media—but they all have that fictional filter between the author and the reader. This isn’t a novel written by a novelist! No, it’s an exchange of letters between lovers. Or it’s a diary kept by a castaway.
According to Wikipedia, “Epistolary novels can be categorized based on the number of people whose letters are included. According to Wikipedia, “Epistolary novels can be categorized based on the number of people whose letters are included. This gives three types of epistolary novels.”
- monophonic (giving the letters of only one character, like Pamela)
- dialogic (giving the letters of two characters, like Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister)
- and polyphonic (with three or more letter-writing characters, such as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Clarissa).
Epistolary novels can also involve different forms of delivery. Letters are the most common, but diaries and journals were also popular fictional forms in the 19th Century. In a future post, I’ll talk about a novel that uses both letters and a diary—and also a few more variations those tricky Victorians invented.
