Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture - Book Review

Style, Fall, 2001 by Laura Rotunno

Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven, eds. Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. ix 231 pp. $57.50 cloth; $18.50 paper.

Novel criticism went postal in the 1980s and 1990s. Between 1919 and 1982, William Warner, Terry Eagleton, and Terry Castle all published book-length readings of Clarissa. Janet Gurkin Altman's seminal formalist study of the epistolary genre, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, appeared in 1982, and Linda S. Kauffman followed with her generic studies of the letter in Discourses of Desire (1986) and Special Delivery (1992). The early 1990s delivered cultural-historical readings of the genre, most notably Elizabeth MacArthur's Extravagant Narratives (1990) that explores closure techniques in fictional and actual letters, Mary Favret's Romantic Correspondence (1993) that examines the cultural and political reasons behind the English epistolary novel's demise, and Nicola Watson's complementary study Revolution and the Form of the British Novel (1994) that emphasizes the use of letters after the epistolary novel's apparent death. And the late 1990s saw the publication of April Alliston's Virtue's Faults (1996), an analysis of the intertextual correspondences between eighteenth-century female epistolary novelists in Britain and France, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook's Epistolary Bodies (1996), an exploration of the eighteenth-century letter-narrative's negotiations between public and private spheres, and Barbara Maria Zaczek's Censored Sentiments (1997), an analysis of the effects of conduct materials on eighteenth-century epistolary writings.

Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven's essay-collection Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture, while acknowledging its debt to this work, underscores a recent trend in epistolary criticism: the move away from fictional and toward actual correspondence. In fact, though specific to the recovery project described in his contribution to this collection, Gerald MacLean's call for "a more fully historicized account of epistolarity than we are likely to get from critical approaches developed from and for the elucidation of epistolary novels" (190) captures the main thrust of Epistolary Histories.

Gilroy and Verhoeven's introduction, which offers a concise overview of epistolary theory, provides a strong opening for this collection whose contributors include epistolary theorists Linda S. Kauffman, Anne Bower, and Clare Brant, besides such well-known critics as Nancy Armstrong, Donna Landry, and MacLean. Mirroring the dialogism of their epistolary subjects, these writers provide not only their contributions but also responses to fellow contributors' chapters. Further adding to this cohesive structure, Gilroy and Verhoeven arrange the contributions in three thematic groupings: "Epistolarity and Femininity," "Cultures of Letters," and "New Epistolary Directions." Though these groupings remain broad and the essays explore some atypical epistolary works, the emphasis remains on Anglo-American texts from the seventeenth century to the present.

"Epistolarity and Femininity" opens with Armstrong's revisitation of the relationship between class politics and the novel's popularity. Her "Writing Women and the Making of the Modern Middle Class" reveals how themes and structures inherent in American colonial captivity narratives are translated into the power of Richardson's epistolary heroines to establish standards of social and moral purity. Ultimately, she suggests, such ideals correspond to the emergent English middle class's vision of itself. Shifting to actual letters, Landry explores the epistolary travel accounts of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Elizabeth, Lady Craven, firstly to uncover the letters' personal and political statements and then to examine generic connections between epistolary and travel writings, while Brant shows how eighteenth-century historians' readings of Mary Queen of Scots's letters created visions of Mary that still influence the study of her. On this basis, Brant convincingly argues that a "history of readers" should acco mpany any epistolary study.

The second section, "Cultures of Letters," turns greater attention to how letters are exchanged and used by writers and readers. Martha Nell Smith's "Suppressing the Books of Susan in Emily Dickinson" explores the history and material facets of Susan and Emily Dickinson's letter exchange. Paralleling Brant's look at Mary's letters, Smith investigates readers' appropriation of Dickinson, suggesting reevaluations of the poet through these letters. Richard Hardack examines the influence of Melville's correspondence with Hawthorne on Melville's philosophy and fiction and similarly argues for the significance of such work for artists' fictional productions.

The concluding section, "New Epistolary Directions," offers innovative looks at the genre with Bower's examination of epistolary literary criticism, MacLean's relocation of epistolary history in artifacts of central Anatolia, and Kauffman's expansion of the genre to include personal ads, telephone conversations, and even performance art. Bower speculates on the letter's ability to "increase the personal, dialogic and emotional content of academic writing" (156), leading to questions of whether literary criticism inhabits both public and private forums. More broadly, MacLean argues for the enrichment of epistolary history through examinations of the practices of those living in central Anatolia between the sixth and second millennia BCE as well as those writing in England during the revolutionary 1640s. He thus revives issues of letters' cultural and political power. Kauffman discusses Kathy Acker's experimental fiction and performance artist Orlan's works, arguing that these versions of epistolarity defy ant iporn crusades and thereby reopen questions of feminine agency and cultural representations of the female body.