Epistolary Correspondence
Adimar Poynter
The epistolary form can be seen as adding greater realism to a story, due to the text existing diegetically within the lives of the characters. It is in particular able to demonstrate differing points of view without recourse to the device of an omniscient narrator. An important strategic device in the epistolary novel for creating the impression of authenticity of the letters is the fictional editor.[4]
Perhaps first work to fully utilize the potential of an epistolary novel was Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister. This work was published anonymously in three volumes (1684, 1685, and 1687), and has been attributed to Aphra Behn though its authorship remains disputed in the 21st century.[8] The novel shows the genre's results of changing perspectives: individual points were presented by the individual characters, and the central voice of the author and moral evaluation disappeared (at least in the first volume; further volumes introduced a narrator). The author furthermore explored a realm of intrigue with complex scenarios such as letters that fall into the wrong hands, faked letters, or letters withheld by protagonists.
The epistolary novel slowly became less popular after 18th century. Although Jane Austen tried the epistolary in juvenile writings and her novella Lady Susan (1794), she abandoned this structure for her later work. It is thought that her lost novel First Impressions, which was redrafted to become Pride and Prejudice, may have been epistolary: Pride and Prejudice contains an unusual number of letters quoted in full and some play a critical role in the plot.
The epistolary form nonetheless saw continued use, surviving in exceptions or in fragments in nineteenth-century novels. In Honor de Balzac's novel Letters of Two Brides, two women who became friends during their education at a convent correspond over a 17-year period, exchanging letters describing their lives. Mary Shelley employs the epistolary form in her novel Frankenstein (1818). Shelley uses the letters as one of a variety of framing devices, as the story is presented through the letters of a sea captain and scientific explorer attempting to reach the north pole who encounters Victor Frankenstein and records the dying man's narrative and confessions. Published in 1848, Anne Bront's novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is framed as a retrospective letter from one of the main heroes to his friend and brother-in-law with the diary of the eponymous tenant inside it. In the late 19th century, Bram Stoker released one of the most widely recognized and successful novels in the epistolary form to date, Dracula. Printed in 1897, the novel is compiled entirely of letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, telegrams, doctor's notes, ship's logs, and the like.
The romance of Camus and Casares is richer, if not sadder, when considered alongside the narratives of each of their work. There is an eerie doubling of life and art. Absurdity is the only certainty, and this is confirmed over and over again by coincidence and chance.
Afterward, Camus took over as editor in chief of Combat, the underground newspaper of the Resistance, and his wife gave birth to twins, Catherine and Jean. Meanwhile, the in-demand Casares was cast in two of her most memorable roles, as a long suffering wife in Les enfants du paradis and as a jilted lover in Les Dames du bois de Boulogne. Four years to the day after their first meeting, on June 6, 1948, Casares ran into Camus by chance on boulevard Saint-Germain. Their correspondence then continued uninterrupted for the next twelve years.
In the letters, desire is sustained through fragments, concentrated moments spent together mythologized during those apart. In their memories, those moments grow more elastic, more mythic than any day-to-day relationship could ever be.
That January, the January of 2020, K and I became instantly, terrifyingly close. In the first week of our friendship, we walked for hours. We talked about our families, other cities we had lived in, people we loved. Whenever we left each other, there were hundreds of things I still wanted to say. I stopped being able to sleep. I spoke to her in my head.
The epistolary form shares this paradox. Letter poems convey a sense of private communication between two parties, but are ultimately intended to be read by an audience. They bring our individual intimacies into the public realm.
For queer writers, for queer people in general, privacy is complicated. We want to be alone, but we want to be alone at our own choosing. We do not want our intimacies to be relegated to the world of the unseen.
The epistolary poems that excite me most are rarely letters from one living monogamous partner to another. I am interested in the poems that capture the speech of longing, and in the poems that attempt to make public illegible, incongruous connections.
Recently, I sat down across the table from her in the same red booth of the bar we first spoke in, where we hid from the rain. I no longer live in New York, though I had come home to visit. We ordered coffee. I had become confused about what exactly constituted an epistolary poem. I wanted to write this essay. I was having a hard time with it.
I remembered, then, the first months of knowing her. I remembered the first poem I wrote that felt indicative of my actual speaking voice, rather than a fragmented interpretation of it. I remembered, also, that I had written the poem out of mild anger.
Since then, there have been other people I have written to. K writes to me, and also to others. We exist within a field of correspondences. I think, sometimes, of an often-repeated fact, that stanza comes from the Italian word for room. A clich, probably. But when contemplating public and private life, queer identity, and our exchanges of letters, it is perhaps helpful think of the poem as a space we build. We can decide who looks in. Some readers may be able to understand the arrangement of the furniture, to hear legible language. Some might be met with opacity. One person might understand everything.
I want to make a poem. I want to make a room where we can meet. I sit down and close my eyes. I picture your face, your hands, your jewelry. When I begin to write, I speak to you directly. I create the thread between us, knowing I can be seen, allowing myself to be overheard.
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.
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.
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