ABSTRACT
Recent criticism has emphasised the fact that, in Robert Adams Day’s words, ‘Samuel Richardson did not invent the novel in letters’ (1966: 10).1
This chapter concentrates on the history of the epistolary novel from its first appearance in English to the publication of Pamela, Richardson’s first novel. Though many critics have noted that the late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century novel-in-letters is concerned with both sex and politics, few have explored the consequences of this double articulation. In particular, little notice has been given to the way in which the clash of competing private and public interests can create crises within the consciousnesses of epistolary heroes and heroines. Though it is too early to discern a split between fully developed narrating and experiencing selves, the earliest epistolary fictions do concern themselves with psychological tensions of the kind which will later be represented in first-person free indirect thought. The letter, especially in this period, is often associated with a relatively straightforward transcription of subjectivity; a transparent, spontaneous outpouring of emotion. Paying close attention to narrative style, this chapter demonstrates that in fact the earliest epistolary narratives in English portray complex, divided consciousnesses.
