The term "epistolary novel" refers to the
works of fiction that are written in the form of 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. These 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 to be 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. 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."
The beautiful young damsel was already a cliche 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. 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. 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.
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. Bamble 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. 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:
I refer to 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. Today, relatively few novels are written
entirely in letters, although there are notable exceptions.
C.S. Lewis's "The Screwtape Letters" from 1942, for example,
and "Bridget Jones's Diary" by Helen Fielding, from 1996,
which borrows many epistolary tropes in order to make her heroine's
misadventures come to life. More recently still, 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!) And Jennifer Egan's
Pulitzer-Prize-winning "A Visit from the Goon Squad"
includes a chapter entirely written in PowerPoint slides.
Finally, it's worth noting that versions of the epistolary form have found their
way into film as well. I'm thinking here of when a movie is
presented in terms of "found footage" so that it is made up of what appears to
be footage shot by the characters themselves--
"The Blair Witch Project" is probably the best known recent example of this--
or by cameras that exists within the frame of the movie itself,
say, home videos in the "Paranormal Activity" franchise.
And many movies will make use of these tactics temporarily even when the entire
movie is not shot that way. A quick shot made to look like it was
recorded by a security camera, for example,
is often used to add realism immediacy and suspense to our viewing experience.
And just think of all the times the characters are shown texting or writing
emails in real time, all of which owes a debt--whether
conscious or not--to Richardson's technique
of "writing to the moment."