The Letters in the Story
Narrative-Epistolary Fiction from Aphra Behn to the Victorians

First study of a long tradition of mixed-mode writing, largely favored by British women novelists, that combined fully-transcribed letters with third-person narrative.

Eve Tavor Bannet (Author)

9781316518854, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 December 2021

280 pages
23.5 x 15.5 x 2.3 cm, 0.58 kg

'This is a book that should be read and its insights pondered by everyone who teaches English fiction between Aphra Behn and Anthony Trollope … The Letters in the Story packs a huge amount of erudition and analytic acuity into a relatively small number of pages … a major contribution to our understanding of viewpoint and meaning in the pre-twentieth-century novel in English.' Robert D. Hume, The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer

The long tradition of mixta-genera fiction, particularly favoured by women novelists, which combined fully-transcribed letters and third-person narrative has been largely overlooked in literary criticism. Working with recognized formal conventions and typical thematic concerns, Tavor Bannet demonstrates how narrative-epistolary novels opposed the real, situated, transactional and instrumental character of letters, with their multi-lateral relationships and temporally shifting readings, to merely documentary uses of letters in history and law. Analyzing issues of reading and misreading, knowledge and ignorance, communication and credulity, this study investigates how novelists adapted familiar romance plots centred on mysteries of identity to test the viability of empiricism's new culture of fact and challenge positivism's later all-pervading regime of truth. Close reading of narrative-epistolary novels by authors ranging from Aphra Behn and Charlotte Lennox to Frances Burney and Wilkie Collins tracks transgenerational debates, bringing to light both what Victorians took from their eighteenth-century forbears and what they changed.

Preface: 'To the reader'
Introduction: The letters in the story
1. Framing narratives and the hermeneutics of suspicion
2. Letters and empirical evidence
3. Cultural expectations and encapsulating letters
4. Epistolary Peripeteia
5. Hermeneutics of perspective.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]