ABSTRACT
These quotations raise questions about the formal, thematic and cultural structures of epistolary practice that underpin this book. The ghastliness of a dead letter, the “shame and shyness” of meeting face-to-face, and an imagined correspondent who “looks down” all hint at a rich interplay that occurs between, on the one hand, the actual corporeal bodies of the writers and, on the other hand, the ways in which these bodies are absent yet
experienced as present to the recipients of their letters. In particular, the haunting image of Barrett Browning’s “moaning letter” poses a question as to what degree writers are embodied in their letters. To quote a passage from Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese that adds movement to sound: “My letters! all dead paper, . . . mute & white!/And yet they seem alive and quivering.”5
