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This chapter defines the concept of familiarity, a means by which even individuals not related by family could achieve family-like relationships. Such familiarity — distinguished from either politeness or intimacy — allowed individuals adrift to join other circles and so find the support they implied. The chapter enumerates the ways familiarity could be established among non-family members by such means as the education and care of a child, or courtship and marriage. Letters helped to carve out a space of familiarity, even when distance separated family members, and forced them to rely on non-family members. Many printed letters, in epistolary manuals (such as The Complete Letter Writer), epistolary novels (such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela), and letter collections (such as that by Lord Chesterfield) helped to popularize this tone of familiarity. Family letters were a critical means of forging familiarity, and they did so in their tones and style, as well as their substance.

This chapter explores the form and function of novels of consciousness. Where novels like Tom Jones and Peregrine Pickle focused on the events that happen in the world, other authors instead focused more intensely on the internal event. Novelists sought the use of letter writing, for example, as a device through which to convey the conscious thoughts of a character. Thus many of the century's fictions took epistolary form—the epistolary novel. Samuel Richardson's Pamela, for example, is a novel that assembles the personal letters written by a single person. The works Familiar Letters and the History of Lady Julia Mandeville present both sides of the correspondence, whereas works such as Humphry Clinker present letters from several different correspondences. The epistolary novel, however, is merely a subcategory of the novel of consciousness. The rest of the chapter is devoted to mapping out the differences that set novels of consciousness apart from novels of development.

This chapter argues that Henry Mackenzie’s novel in letters Julia de Roubigné marks a transition from epistolary novels that are characterized by numerous correspondents who betray a desperate need for response to nineteenth-century frame tales that unite multiple speakers and eager listeners. Predicting the continued force of epistolary affect and perspective in novels published well into the nineteenth century, Julia de Roubigné indicates the role that fictional scenes of sympathetic response play in the historical transition from the novel in letters to the letter in the novel. This function of sympathy points to the persistent significance of the emotional immediacy and multiple perspectives that are characteristic of a logic of epistolarity, which in turn guides the shifting speakers and listeners of retrospective frame tales, such as René, Frankenstein, and Wuthering Heights, discussed in later chapters.

This chapter discusses differences and similarities between ancient and modern epistolary narratives, comparing Richardson's Pamela, Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses and Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Documents in the Case with the collections of letters attributed to Plato, Themistocles, Chion and Euripides. Striking differences emerge: the ancient examples are much shorter, their protagonists are famous historical individuals, they show a prominent apologetic element, and they not all chronologically arranged. The ancient examples contain only letters, and never present an editor, although ancient literature had ‘discovered texts'. Both ancient and modern examples are deeply interested in the psychology of characters and their motivation, in the power but also the dangers of communication in letters, and in epistolarity itself. Understanding the Greek epistolary collections requires looking beyond the modern epistolary novel, especially to ancient biography and apologetic literature such as the Socratic works of Plato and Xenophon.

This chapter discusses Johann Wolfgang Goethe's first novel, The Sufferings of Young Werther (1774). This novel not only created a new kind of hero with whom a whole generation of young readers could identify but also set up a narrative framework that made the history of Werther available to psychological interpretation. Knowing oneself means to have succeeded in establishing a relation to oneself, and this complicated and difficult endeavor is not possible without a medium. Since Goethe's famous epistolary novel, this medium, in a completely new and emphatically modern sense, has carried the name literature. In Western literary history, The Sufferings of Young Werther is known as the novel with which a new form of individuality finds literary expression. The form of the epistolary novel serves as a vehicle, translating the discourse of the self into a seemingly communicative structure and successfully turning the incomprehensible individual monad into an apparently readable subject for a contemporary audience.

This chapter considers the famous “inward turn” Samuel Richardson's seminal sentimental novel, Clarissa, instantiates at the level of both form and moral theme. The story of a virtuous young woman who finds that virtue can no longer be realized in obedience to her elders, Clarissa locates itself at the heart of the liberal Enlightenment through the importance it attaches to the judgments and feelings of its heroine. But the relationship between judgment and feeling it envisions is an ambiguous one. On the one hand, Richardson's heroine represents her judgments as instinctive responses, the work of her judging heart, which mysteriously reveals God's laws. On the other hand, she understands judgment to entail scrutinizing the heart from a standpoint of relative impartiality. This account is sentimentalist because it takes impartiality to be a contingency of Clarissa's epistolary friendship with Anna Howe, who helps Clarissa gain distance from her heart's promptings by becoming a co-spectator of them. I suggest that the first, broadly religious, paradigm of judgment identifies Clarissa only ambiguously as an independent moral agent: while she is justified by the highest principles to defy worldly authority, she nonetheless remains God's obedient servant. By contrast, the second, broadly secular paradigm mobilizes an at once less transcendental and more compelling understanding of autonomy as moral independence nurtured by friendship and debate.

Chapter 3, “Getting Around the Protocity,” tracks the emerging city’s local and associative networks through the practices of urban visiting and letter writing that structure Hannah Webster Foster’s epistolary texts The Coquette (1797) and The Boarding School (1798). I highlight gendered models of urban mobility and education by contrasting Foster’s texts to the first Franklinian formulations of city- and self-making that had become available to American readers in 1794. Uniquely among the texts in Urban Rehearsals, Foster’s books are set in the present and contain letters written by young white urban characters that describe the particular places within and among which they move. Most readers of early American novels are familiar with The Coquette, in which seduction turns Eliza Wharton’s spirited mobility into tragic stasis, just as it did for the real Elizabeth Whitman and the fictional Charlotte Temple. Foster’s second book, The Boarding School, features an all-female cast of characters who teach one another how to navigate new urban spaces more successfully than their seduced sisters. By avoiding specific events like the scandal that anchors The Coquette, in The Boarding School Foster offers a networked, open-ended theory of urbanity that parallels but also challenges the individuated, progressive view of urban development presented in the just-published book version of Benjamin Franklin’s Memoirs (1794). Foster’s city, like Franklin’s city, is a white city, but her female urbanites are alive and well—and determined to put their own intellectual stamp on the cities they inhabit.

This chapter argues that Thomas Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1845) enacts a methodological struggle between the ‘artist’ and the ‘workman’, associating the ‘artist historian’ with new kinds of subjectivity primarily connected with the emergence of the novel while correlating the ‘workman’ with an antiquarian attention to empirical detail. The literary model Carlyle draws upon for his characterization of the artist is that of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel, from which he develops a new kind of cognitive or psychological history that is more focused on fashioning a self than on interpreting events in the hermeneutic mode. Yet Carlyle’s methodology is also highly empirical, as the artist must adopt the techniques of the workman in order to ‘impersonate’ his historical subject. This duality not only disrupts teleologies about the development of the modern historical method but also points to the ambivalent relationship between history and literature in the period.

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple revises the traditional English epistolary novel, a form invented by men writing about women. This chapter argues that both author and her women characters, Celie and Shug, work to transform the traditionally patriarchal and oppressive institutions of literature, religion, and family. On a formal level, Walker subverts white and male literary codes and conventions; on the level of plot and theme, she rewrites the codes and conventions that dominate social and sexual relations. Also emphasized is the importance of popular culture (blues), material culture (quilting and sewing), and folk culture (conjuring)—forms that represent the female bonding achieved through collective labor.

This chapter evaluates Joseph Perl's work on hasidism, Megaleh temirin (Revealer of Secrets: The First Hebrew Novel, 1997). Megaleh temirin is an epistolary novel that parodied the hasidic books and idiom of the early nineteenth century. As the reader gradually becomes aware, the letters of the hasidic protagonists reveal at least two interrelated plots: (1) the effort to locate and destroy the bukh, and (2) the quixotic attempts of the followers of two rival hasidic groups to champion one rebbe over the other. The very richness of Megaleh temirin has probably discouraged previous scholars from translating it into English, but on this score Dov Taylor has done an admirable job at making this volume, under the title Revealer of Secrets, accessible to the modern reader of English. In order to convey a sense of the faulty written Hebrew of the hasidic protagonists, Taylor has translated their letters into the somewhat ungrammatical English of Jews whose mother tongue is Yiddish or Polish.

The second chapter discusses Françoise de Graffigny’s Letters from a Peruvian Woman (1747) and Isabelle de Charrière’s Letters of Mistress Henley (1784). Responding to Nancy Armstrong, the chapter shows that Graffigny and Charrière subvert their period’s fascination with letters as means of affirming the larger significance of small domestic interactions and events. Instead, these two epistolary novelists treat the physical smallness of these letters as a metonymy of their protagonists’ similarly limited scopes of material presence and experience. At the end of both novels, the protagonists no longer look to their letters as measures of their ambitious hopes of being heard and understood. The letters reflect, instead, their frailty and finitude as beings who expect such attention from others.

Early Christians acted “out of love” for Paul—to quote a phrase from Tertullian—producing other texts and stories in his name or associated with him. Such pseudepigraphical writings should be understood in the context of Roman “practices of history” found, for example, in the spheres of education, entertainment, and literature. Pseudepigraphical and other references to Paul are found in Thessalonikē: 1 Thessalonians becomes the grounds for civic pride in the apostle over several centuries. Letters in Paul’s name (like 2 Thessalonians) or stories about him (as in the Acts of the Apostles) indicate ongoing engagement. These are improvisations that complicate the categories of history and fiction. Such texts and practices, for which we also find archaeological evidence in Ephesos and Philippi, must be understood within the context of “epistolary narratives” in antiquity that sought to expand the life of a famous figure, not as instantiations of forgery or lies.

Literary culture of the German Enlightenment experimented with a new ideal of female nature and authorship, exulting in Sophie von La Roche’s reportedly artless epistolary novel, Lady Sophie Sternheim(1771), as a work of sensibility, confession, and moral strength. The heroine of that novel chooses letter writing and music as her preferred media, anticipating the rise of feminocentric values in the musical culture of the last three decades of the century. In parodies of Forkel’s Musical Almanacsof 1782-84, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Kapellmeister to Fredrick the Great, addressed a bourgeois amateur readership, highlighting female excellence and influence, and mingling music, visual art, and literature in a innovative, critical mode that understood artistic practices as occasions for feeling, pleasure, private sociality, and love. Reichardt draw upon new ideas of womanhood, connected with the emerging two-sex model that sometimes figured women as better suited than men to intellectual and artistic pursuits.

This chapter describes how the chapter’s author, Ethel Morgan Smith, met Alice Bookman in her screenwriting class at a writer’s conference on St. Simon in Georgia. During the author’s last three months in Atlanta, her fast friendship with Alice had flourished into lunches and talking on the telephone daily about books and writing. When Smith finally moved to Roanoke she and Alice continued to be in touch by way of telephone, and sometimes quick notes or cards. Alice even suggested that they write an epistolary novel. After hearing news of Alice’s death, Smith felt a deep sadness and realized the sad fact that most of us are closer to friends than family. Deep in her heart Smith knew that Alice’s passing signified a great loss for all who knew her.