The Epistolary Muse

Adrian Kempton was formerly lecturer in French, English and Comparative Literature at Queen's University Belfast, University College Cork and the University of London Institute in Paris. He specializes in comparative eighteenth-century studies, with particular interests in epistolary writing, robinsonades, early children's literature, salon art criticism and gardens. His publications include Survey of English Literature: From the Restoration to Pre-Romanticism, English for Science and The Mind's Isle: Imaginary Islands in English Fiction (Peter Lang, 2017). He is at present preparing a two-part study of the verse novel and poetry in the novel.

Epistolary fiction was in full flower during the period from 1652 to 1802, featuring the masterworks of Guilleragues, Richardson, Rousseau and Laclos. This study traces the development of the art of letter-writing and familiar correspondence and its adaptation by women writers into a remarkable range of literary genres, both fictional and non-fictional. In addition to the better known categories of the monodic love-letter sequence and the polyphonic epistolary novel, these sub-genres include letter miscellanies, essays, travelogues, educational novels and verse epistles. To all these, women writers made a valuable, and sometimes totally original, contribution. Indeed, it could be said that it was essentially through letter-writing that women achieved literary recognition.

This volume examines each of these epistolary categories in turn, revealing how women writers from either country excelled in a particular genre: the French, for example, in the epistolary monody and fictional foreign correspondence, the English in the miscellany and verse epistle, and both in the polyphonic letter-novel. Finally, the study notes how, despite the rapid decline of epistolary fiction in the nineteenth century, a select number of letter-novels by American, English and French women writers still continue to be published.

Epistolary fiction was in full flower during the period from 1652 to 1802, including the masterworks of Richardson and Laclos. This study traces the development of the art of letter-writing and familiar correspondence and its adaptation by women writers into a remarkable range of literary genres, both fictional and non-fictional.

CONTENTS: Model letter-writers - Manuals and miscellanies - Educational letter-novels - Epistolary essays and arguments - Travellers' dispatches - Letters home from exotic visitors - Unreciprocated love-letters - Epistolary memoirs, journals and diaries - Letters and epistles in verse - The multiple-voice letter-novel in England - The multiple-voice letter-novel in France.