Nelson-Denny Practice Test 5

Stories Told in Letters

¹In an epistolary novel, the story is told entirely or mostly through documents written by the characters themselves, usually letters but sometimes diary entries or other records. The form flourished in eighteenth-century Europe. Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), told largely through the letters of a young servant, was one of the most widely read books of its time in England, and dozens of imitators followed.

²Part of the form's appeal lay in its sense of immediacy. Because a letter is written soon after the events it reports, the writer does not yet know how things will turn out. Readers share the character's uncertainty and see feelings recorded while they are still fresh, an effect Richardson himself called "writing to the moment." The form also let readers feel that they were looking over a private shoulder, reading words never meant for their eyes.

³Yet the same features created difficulties. A letter writer can report only what he or she knows, so authors had to invent ways for characters to learn of important events, sometimes straining belief. Critics also mocked heroines who, in the middle of some crisis, paused to compose long and carefully worded letters. And when several characters write, the reader must piece together the truth from accounts that may conflict, a task that some readers find rewarding and others merely confusing.

⁴By the nineteenth century, novelists generally preferred a narrator who could move freely among the thoughts of many characters. The epistolary form did not vanish, however. Mary Shelley framed Frankenstein with an explorer's letters to his sister, and later writers have adapted the method to diaries, e-mails and text messages.