What Is an Epistolary Novel? A Story Told Entirely in Documents

Building a novel from documents removes the narrator and replaces them with writers who have their own purposes, limitations and audiences. That produces immediacy, since a letter is written close to the events it describes and without knowing how they will turn out, which supplies suspense that retrospective narration cannot. It produces interiority, since private writing admits what speech does not. It produces unreliability as a structural feature rather than a trick, since every document is written by someone with a reason to present things a certain way, and the reader assembles the truth from conflicting accounts. And it produces a particular kind of dramatic irony, since the reader sees documents the characters have not seen and knows more than any single writer does. The form therefore offers by construction several effects that conventional narration has to work for.

The constraints are severe and explain why the form is difficult to sustain:

• •Everything must plausibly be written down, which rules out anything happening too fast or too privately to record
• •Action is always reported rather than shown, since a letter describes what happened rather than depicting it
• •The writer must survive to write, which limits how dangerous a scene can be without a workaround
• •Someone must have collected the documents, which requires an explanation the novel has to supply or ignore
• •Multiple correspondents are needed for any perspective beyond one, which multiplies the machinery
• •Letters are long and slow, so pace becomes a structural problem that the author must solve repeatedly

The form dominated the eighteenth-century novel to a degree that is hard to appreciate now. Several of the earliest works regarded as novels in English are collections of letters, and the approach suited a moment when letter writing was a widespread and self-conscious practice, when private correspondence was a recognised literary genre in its own right, and when the novel needed to claim it was true rather than invented, which a bundle of authentic-looking documents supports. The form was also well suited to the subject matter those novels favoured, since courtship, seduction and reputation are conducted substantially in writing and depend on who reads what. Its decline followed the development of confident third-person narration, which offered access to any character at any moment without the machinery, and by the nineteenth century the form was residual, surviving in individual works rather than as a norm.

A partial version is far more common than the complete form and does much of the same work. Conventional novels insert letters, diaries, newspaper reports and transcripts at intervals, which supplies a voice the narration cannot reach, breaks the texture of the prose and frequently delivers information the narrator does not have. Mystery and detective fiction relies on it heavily, since the reader is meant to weigh evidence and a document presented directly allows that in a way a summary does not. Frame narratives, where a novel opens with someone finding a manuscript, use the device to establish authenticity before abandoning it. The partial approach avoids every structural cost of the pure form while keeping the effects, which is why it has proved so much more durable, and a reader who notices how often a novel reaches for a document will find the pattern almost everywhere.

The form keeps coming back and the pattern of its returns is revealing. Nineteenth-century gothic novels used assembled documents to create the impression of evidence, since a horror story is more effective presented as a dossier of testimony than as a tale, and one famous example is built entirely from journals, letters, newspaper cuttings and recordings. Twentieth-century works used documents for satire and for formal experiment. Each new medium of private writing has produced its own version, with novels built from telegrams, from answering machine messages, from electronic mail, from text messages and from social media posts, and the revival is not nostalgia but recognition that the original advantages apply to any medium people write in. The current versions face a new version of the old problem, since the reader must believe someone assembled the archive, which is easier when the medium is already stored and searchable.

Removing the narrator and replacing them with writers who have their own purposes produces immediacy, interiority and structural unreliability by construction. The costs are that everything must be written down, action is reported rather than shown, and someone must have collected the documents. The form dominated the eighteenth-century novel and returns with every new medium of private writing.