ABSTRACT
In recent years scholars from many different disciplines have turned their attention to letters, pointing out that they are not only important as sources of information and ways to enable families and friends to maintain links across vast distances, but also as a literary genre with rules and conventions, a form of social practice and a means of self-fashioning. For women in particular, while mobility and opportunities for social engagement were often limited, letters offered a way not just of being in contact with people, but of determining how to represent themselves while doing so.2 Much of this new scholarly interest has been articulated and developed by those interested in literature, but it has served also to make historians see letters in new ways, and to develop a much greater understanding of the complexities involved in reading and using them as source materials and expanding their interest in the importance of changing epistolary practices over time.
