The epistolary novel (where the story is told through a collection of fictional documents, most commonly letters) was all the rage in the eighteenth century, with Samuel Richardson’s novels of seduction Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) reaching adoring audiences. Lady Susan (written 1793–94) reveals the 18-year-old Jane Austen’s interest in this form’s possibilities for pleasure and irony. Austen ‘tests herself as well as the limits of the epistolary novel’ by transforming Lovelace, the arch-machinator of Richardson’s Clarissa, into a woman, ‘seeking dominion over men and a fortune for herself’ (Johnson 2003, p. xxvii). John Mullan points out that the first draft of Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility was in letter form (first drafted in 1795, not published until 1811) but she changed her mind, ‘prophetic of the decline of the epistolary novel in the nineteenth century’ (Mullan 1992, p. 22).
The epistolary novel’s decline was not the end of the literary letter, however. Writers tucked letters into their novels to introduce a new character, signal a crisis or prompt a rethink. They not only convey the voice of the letter-writer (think of Mr Collins’ pompous letter to Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice) but reveal their minds at work, capturing the exact moment in which they are written. Mrs Gardiner, Elizabeth Bennet’s beloved aunt, writing in response to Lizzy’s urgent request to explain Darcy’s presence at Lydia and Wickham’s wedding, writes at length, breaking off at the end with an apology: ‘But I must write no more. The children have been wanting me this half hour’ (Ch. 52). This real time pressure makes the letter a bridge between writer and reader.
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