epistolary novel - Early works, Later works, Literary and intellectual points

A novel in letters - one whose narrative is conducted by an exchange of letters between the characters. Richardson's Clarissa (1748) popularized the form, and influenced Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782, Dangerous Liaisons). Interesting possibilities and complications arise due to the shifting point of view and the absence of an omniscient narrator. Mark Harris's Wake Up, Stupid (1959) and John Barth's Letters (1979) are interesting modern examples. Among famous examples of epistolary novels in which all the letters are written by one person are Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Hölderlin's Hyperion (1797).

An epistolary novel is written as a series of documents.

One argument for using the epistolary form is that it can add greater realism and verisimilitude to the story, chiefly because it mimics the workings of real life.

Early works

It is difficult to make out "the first" epistolary novel. The exchange between Abelard and Heloise, imbedded in the Roman de la Rose (1230) was an epistolary novel.

The first novel to explore deeply the complex play that the genre allows was Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Noble-Man and his Sister, which appeared in three successive volumes in 1684, 1685, and 1687.

The epistolary novel as a genre became popular in the 18th century in the works of such authors as Samuel Richardson, with his immensely successful novels Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1749). In France, there was Lettres persanes (1721) by Montesquieu, followed by Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), which used the epistolary form to great dramatic effect, because the sequence of events was not always related directly or explicitly. The first North American novel, The History of Emily Montague (1769) by Frances Brooke was written in epistolary form.

Later in the 18th century, the epistolary form was subject to much ridicule, resulting in a number of savage burlesques.

The epistolary novel slowly fell out of use in the 19th century. By the time Jane Austen popularized the technique of the omniscient narrator, the epistolary form had become somewhat archaic. For example, Pride and Prejudice (1813) was originally written as an epistolary novel, but Austen rewrote it using a third-person omniscient narrator.

Later works

Epistolary novels have since made rare but memorable appearances in more recent literature.

Fyodor Dostoevsky used the epistolary format for his first novel, Poor Folk (1846), as a series of letters between two lovers, struggling to cope with their impoverished circumstances and their fleeting plans to marry.

The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins uses a collection of various documents to construct a detective novel in English. Most epistolary novels present the documents without questions about how they were gathered.

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) uses not only letters and diaries, but dictation discs and newspaper accounts. Lewis used the epistolary form for The Screwtape Letters (1942), and considered writing a companion novel from an angel's point of view -- though he never did so.

See List of contemporary epistolary novels for other modern examples, including works by Vladimir Nabokov and Stephen King.

Literary and intellectual points

Often, narrators of epistolary fiction are somewhat untrustworthy or biased. Sometimes epistolary fiction is used to create a Russian-doll-like effect of letters within letters within letters.