Epistolary novel

Titlepage of Aphra Behn's Love-Letters (1684)

An epistolary novel or Briefroman is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. The word epistolary comes from the word epistle, meaning a letter.

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. It is thus able to demonstrate differing points of view without recourse to the device of an omniscient narrator.

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 a popular epistolary, but is not a novel. Several Humanists wrote satirical fictional letters. The 17th century saw the genre exploring politics and scandal. The (sexually explicit) Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1667-1668) by Marianna Alcoforado became immensely famous and were translated into several European languages.

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 (1684), which appeared in three successive volumes in 1684, 1685, and 1687. The novel tested the genre's limits of changing perspectives: individual points were presented by the individual correspondents, and the central author's voice and moral judgement disappeared (at least in the first volume; her further volumes introduced a narrator). Behn furthermore explored a realm of intrigue with letters that fall into the wrong hands, with faked letters, with letters withheld by protagonists, and even more complex interaction.

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. In Germany, there was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774) (The Sorrows of Young Werther). 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 most notable example of these was Henry Fielding's Shamela (1741), written as a parody of Pamela. In it, the female narrator can be found wielding a pen and scribbling her diary entries under the most dramatic and unlikeliest of circumstances.

The epistolary novel slowly fell out of use in the latter eighteenth century. Although Austen tried her hand at the epistolary in her juvenile work Lady Susan, she turned more toward the omniscient narrative style popularized by Fanny Burney and Charlotte Smith of the generation of writers before her.

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. In the second piece, a character explains that he is writing his portion because another had observed to him that the events surrounding the disappearance of a certain moonstone might reflect poorly on the family, if misunderstood, and therefore he was collecting the true story. This is an unusual element. Most epistolary novels present the documents without questions about how they were gathered. He also used the form previously in The Woman in White(1859).

The Beatrice Letters by Lemony Snicket consists of letters and notes between himself and Beatrice. The book is obviously meant to be humorous while at the same time explaining some of the mysteries surrounding the Baudelaires. Several of the letters (mostly from Lemony Snicket) tend to be very long and rambling; one goes on about his love for Beatrice for four pages.

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) uses not only letters and diaries, but dictation discs and newspaper accounts.

C. S. 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.

Some of J.D. Salinger's stories about the Glass family are written in the form of letters.

Stephen Chbosky's debut novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower is an epistolary novel, written in the form of letters from an anonymous boy called only Charlie, detailing his freshman year of high school and the trials and tribulations of growing up and reaching adolescence.

Alice Walker uses the epistolary form in her novel, The Color Purple -- a novel about Celie, a black woman in the South.

The blog format has now created a sub-genre of epistolary novel, such as For Ilford Dyson, I Hope You Find This[1] an on-going fiction, where the main character addresses his blog to a friend of his late father.

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. This can confuse the reader as to who is actually talking at any one time, and whose account is being told.

• This style has been effective for mystery writers. For example, see Agatha Christie's novels.

External links

• Aphra Behn, Love-Letters between a Noble-Man and his Sister (1684-87).