The Anglophone Epistolary Novel
Dearest readers,
About a hundred pages in to Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778), the titular heroine writes the following: “How many long letters has this one short fortnight produced!” This might be an axiom for the epistolary novel, which tends to assume that no sooner is life experienced than it is converted into letters, stamped, sealed, and addressed. The eighteenth-century epistolary novel is associated with the rise of realism—Samuel Richardson’s enormously popular Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) is often considered a landmark text in this regard—but there is a sense in which the genre