ABSTRACT
This book attends to a type of novel whose stylistic influence has been neglected. Though it is indisputable that many early novels were in letters,1
the epistolary novel has too often been treated as an isolated, digressive episode in the history of the novel as a whole, limited to the 120 years from Roger L’Estrange’s first translation of Les Lettres portugaises2 in 1678 to Jane Austen’s decision in late 1797 or early 1798 to transform the probably epistolary ‘Elinor and Marianne’ into the third-person narrative of Sense and Sensibility.3 It is often seen as an exclusively late seventeenth-and eighteenth-century phenomenon; an early, experimental form which faded away once the third-person novel began to realise its potential in the hands of novelists such as Austen and George Eliot. English Showalter’s view is typical: ‘the epistolary novel, despite the prestige of Richardson and Rousseau, was obviously a technical dead end’ (1972: 121).
