epistolary novel

epistolary novel, a novel told through the medium of letters written by one or more of the characters. Originating with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), the story of a servant girl’s victorious struggle against her master’s attempts to seduce her, it was one of the earliest forms of novel to be developed and remained one of the most popular up to the 19th century. The epistolary novel’s reliance on subjective points of view makes it the forerunner of the modern psychological novel.

The advantages of the novel in letter form are that it presents an intimate view of the character’s thoughts and feelings without interference from the author and that it conveys the shape of events to come with dramatic immediacy. Also, the presentation of events from several points of view lends the story dimension and verisimilitude. Though the method was most often a vehicle for sentimental novels, it was not limited to them. Of the outstanding examples of the form, Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) has tragic intensity, Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771) is a picaresque comedy and social commentary, and Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) is a novel of manners. Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the form as a vehicle for his ideas on marriage and education in La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761; “The New Eloise”), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe used it for his statement of Romantic despair, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther). The letter novel of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances), is a work of penetrating and realistic psychology.

Some disadvantages of the form were apparent from the outset. Dependent on the letter writer’s need to “confess” to virtue, vice, or powerlessness, such confessions were susceptible to suspicion or ridicule. The servant girl Pamela’s remarkable literary powers and her propensity for writing on all occasions were cruelly burlesqued in Henry Fielding’s Shamela (1741), which pictures his heroine in bed scribbling, “I hear him coming in at the Door,” as her seducer enters the room. From 1800 on, the popularity of the form declined, though novels combining letters with journals and narrative were still common. In the 20th century letter fiction was often used to exploit the linguistic humour and unintentional character revelations of such semiliterates as the hero of Ring Lardner’s You Know Me Al (1916).

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