Imaginary Letters

Richardson, Laclos, Burney

Letter, 1920, Wikimedia Commons

After the better part of a year posting on “letters” in the extended sense of the term, I thought it was past time to write about the genuine article. Letters, after all, may be the single most important class of biographical documents. Most people don’t keep diaries or write memoirs.¹ If we know anything at all about the minds and hearts of the vast majority of historical figures, if we feel we have a glimpse of their day-to-day lives, it’s because of their correspondence. They form the skeleton of most modern biographies, their outlines just visible beneath the critical integument.

They’re also the basis of one of the most gripping literary forms. This past fall, I read the latest volume of the excellent new scholarly edition of Samuel Richardson’s Letters, which inevitably returned me to the form that made him famous, the epistolary novel, and ultimately prompted me to reread Dangerous Liaisons. (A fundamentally different experience before and after reading Richardson.) A few reflections, then, on the rise and fall and partial rise again of this most gripping of literary modes.

Origins

The first real epistolary novel was the French Letters of a Portuguese Nun, published in Paris in 1669. Letter writing was on the rise everywhere, and so was prose fiction; it was inevitable that the two would meet and merge. But this was the novel that got things started. It’s a collection of five plaintive letters from young woman—the Portuguese nun, obviously—to the seducer who has abandoned her. The little book is barely a novel, even in the narrower, stranger seventeenth-century sense of the term. Nothing much happens, and the nun’s lover never replies. To the modern reader, the succession of unanswered pleas quickly moves from pathos to bathos. But it was a huge, European success, quickly translated into multiple languages and with much more staying power than one might suspect (Rilke, eventually, would translate it into German.)

It wasn’t long before other writers picked up and adapted the model. In general, they borrowed not only the epistolary form, but the seduction plot. Breathless letters described rumpled dresses, raised petticoats, and bosoms laid bare—all in the service of an austere, if not always wholly convincing, sexual moral. Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684-87) was one of the earlier examples. Had it not quickly spiraled from a salacious erotic tale into a dense political allegory of the Monmouth Rebellion, it might be better known today (topical satire was the siren song that lured Restoration authors onto the rocks of tedium).

In the eighteenth century, authors began to master the form. Richardson’s Pamela (1740) was followed by Graffigny’s Peruvian Letters (1747), Rousseau’s New Heloise (1761), Burney’s Evelina (1778), and Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons (1782), among others. And, of course, at the center of this chain of development, both literally and figuratively, there was Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), the greatest (and longest) novel of the eighteenth century, translated by Prevost, passionately admired by Diderot and Sade, imitated by Rousseau and Laclos. Back and forth the epistolary novel traveled across the Channel, one of the links that bound English and French culture together in the age of the Enlightenment.

Only toward the end of the epistolary novel’s heyday was the Anglo-French monopoly broken. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which made the the 24-year-old author into a literary superstar, took considerable liberties with the genre, giving it a new aesthetic direction, shifting its focus from sex to love, and its center of gravity from female to male consciousness. By then, the new techniques of narration were being devised that would ultimately supplant it. Some literary cultures may still have found the form useful as a kind of narrative crutch, but English and French novelists were finding they could do without it.

A Transitional Form

One way of understanding eighteenth-century epistolary fiction, then, is as a stage in the development of the novel. When Richardson first turned to writing novels, prose fiction wasn’t close to being able to compete with drama in the depiction of rounded characters. In drama, audiences have multiple sources of information about characters. There are the words of the characters themselves: their own complex and evolving accounts of their internal states and actions, reaching fever pitch in the soliloquy. Then there are the ways other characters respond to them, which inevitably shapes our own perceptions. And there are discussions of them and their actions when they’re offstage. Character in the first, second, and third person, if you like.

Take Hamlet: of course we have the magnificent soliloquies, masterpieces of despair and disenchantment. “How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, / Seem to me all the uses of this world!” We also have responses to Hamlet by his interlocutors: the promptings and proddings of Claudius, the bewildered badinage of Polonius, Ophelia’s wounded, formal replies. Finally, constant conversation about the prince—“I will be brief: your noble son is mad”— “The glass of fashion and the mould of form, / The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!”

Inevitably, the three never fully align; in the early modern theater, they’re often not even close. Whether that’s a consequence of looser, less unified conceptions of character, as many scholars have argued, or, on the contrary, the deliberate manipulation of dramatic possibility for the enrichment of character, as Romantic critics argued, the effect is the same. Character on the early modern stage is marvelously dynamic and intensely problematic. Characters are living, changing, and internally contradictory, a riddle to themselves and to us. It’s the gaps and disjunctions that make them feel so real and rounded.

The fictional narratives of early modernity simply couldn’t depict characters with this level of complexity.² But letters achieve exactly this effect. They’re essentially dramatic in their depiction of character, though they have a lot more words to play with. As Richardson wrote in the preface to Clarissa, the letters between the characters are composed in the thick of events, without the clarity or reserve of distance, and passions are inevitably high. They’re full of “instantaneous descriptions and reflections,” often “written in the dialogue or dramatic way.” It’s irresistible, enthralling drama, in every sense of the word. Richardson, who had begun his career composing letter writing guides, was a superb theorist of the form as well as its master practitioner; he knew exactly what he was doing. So did Laclos, whose approach was shaped by his own critical reflections on the epistolary mode, in which his reading of Richardson played a substantial role.

The effect is mesmerizing. Clarissa, Lovelace, Valmont, and Madame de Merteuil are characters we know as fully as any in literature—better, even, than they know themselves. Everyone thought so at the time. They were touchstones for conversations about sexual and social mores, every bit as exemplary as if they were real.

It wasn’t until writers developed more sophisticated narrative techniques for depicting consciousness in relation to plot, above all free indirect discourse, that narrative prose fiction could match the epistolary novel. With free indirect discourse, narrative was able to move in and out of characters’ perspectives, balancing them against one another and against the abstract third person narration, with remarkable fluidity and elegance. The effects were similar, but the seams no longer showed.

Traditionally, Jane Austen is the writer Anglophone readers associate with this turning point. But I think the break came slightly earlier: with Fanny Burney—and with Goethe. Burney and Goethe both wrote first novels in the epistolary form (Evelina and Werther) before moving on to third person narration in their masterpieces, Cecilia and Camilla in Burney’s case; Wilhelm Meister in Goethe’s. Jane Austen made a feint in the same direction, with Lady Susan and with Elinor and Marianne, the epistolary first draft of the novel that ultimately became Sense and Sensibility. But she had the example of Burney before her eyes. Besides, it was 1811 by then; things had moved on.

This Smooth Stream of Pleasure

A Whig narrative of literary history, then, with the epistolary novel as the mere training ground for the greater achievement of the nineteenth century novel? A lesser effort rendered obsolete by its successor? Clarissa: Madame Bovary :: Gallathea: As You Like It, say? Not quite. Literary history, after all, is rarely so clear-cut.

No one would deny the awesome skill involved in nineteenth-century narrative technique. But there was a price. At its best, the epistolary novel, like drama, has an urgency and immediacy that more distanced and controlled narratives, for all their advantages, can never quite match. Reading Clarissa is like watching a horror movie: you’re forever shouting the equivalent of “get out of the house!” (Sometimes it’s “don’t get out of the house!” but the idea is the same.) Or, as Diderot puts it,

O Richardson! whether we wish it or not, we play a part in your works, we intervene in the conversation, we give it approval and blame, we feel admiration, irritation and indignation. How many times have I caught myself, as happens with children being taken to the theatre for the first time, shouting out: Don't believe him, he's deceiving you ... If you go there it will be the end of you.³

The actor Colley Cibber, who was one of the many people to whom Richardson circulated portions of Clarissa for their reactions as he was writing it, was similarly passionate. Having read a bit more than half, he loved the novel, yet was terrified about where things were headed:

O Lord! Lord! can there be any thing yet to come that will trouble this smooth stream of pleasure I am bathing in… How will you be able to support this spirit? In Clarissa’s following letter you have, with admirable art, removed the objection of Clarissa’s not having followed Miss Howe’s advice not to delay any moment in her power to marry Lovelace, as the only means to redeem her from misery. And yet I tremble for the life she is to lead at London.⁴

Everyone feels this way when reading Clarissa. If Richardson ever has a Substack moment, I expect my Notes feed will contain little else for about a month. Letters are very close to life, inevitably immersed in its current. The epistolary novel makes use of that immediacy in its “smooth stream of pleasure.”

For a little while, following the mass adoption of email, it looked as if the epistolary novel was going to make a comeback. There were novels like Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2011), Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette? (2012) and the emails in Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021). But that moment seems to have passed, no doubt because the personal email has become much less important in the age of social media and texting. Intermezzo had texts, not emails. If writers want the immediacy of life documents, the novel will have to find a way to metabolize other, more vital forms. Substack notes, maybe.⁵

1. Or, if they do keep memoirs, they’re often based on a perusal of their own letters. This was Rousseau’s method, as he describes toward the conclusion of The Confessions.

2. Though Cervantes and Madame de Lafayette come pretty close. And, of course, in nonfictional prose, there is Montaigne.

3. Diderot, “Eloge de Richardson,” selections here.

4. The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, vol. 9, Ed. Curran, Justice, and Hammerschmidt, p. 151.

5. Kidding! Or am I? This whole piece is largely pursuant to a conversation on Notes with

Andras Kisery

,

Alan Horn

and

Secret Squirrel

about Enlightenment vs. Romantic models for a literary future.