SOURCE: "The Epistolary Novel Arrives," in Told in Letters: Epistolary Fiction Before Richardson, The University of Michigan Press, 1966, pp. 146–91.

[In the following excerpt from a study of epistolary fiction, Day characterizes Rowe's writings as a combination of the miscellany collection and works of moral instruction.]

The pen is almost as pretty an implement in a woman's fingers, as a needle.

—Samuel Richardson (to Lady Bradshaigh)

When the Portuguese Letters appeared in English in 1678, they did more than popularize a style of epistolary expression. L'Estrange's book introduced the English public to a new departure in fiction—a long, complex story told (or suggested) in letters alone. Five years later came Part I of Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, the first original English novel entirely in epistolary form. The many similar tales appearing in the next decades ranged from single short letters to long novels and differed greatly in complexity and literary merit. Some few of them—ten to twenty—can be called epistolary novels without straining the definition. Because of their pioneering steps in fictional technique, they merit comparison with the work of the greater novelists after 1740.

These novels advanced fictional technique in four ways. Their authors tried to deal with fairly long stories and complex plots with subtlety, and they used many technical devices typical of mature epistolary fiction, such as Richardson's. They gave their work a depth largely new to fiction by concentrating on details of character, motivation, and action, by using multiple points of view, and by maintaining a uniform tone and texture in their novels, in contrast to the uneven narrative of the partly epistolary tales. They began to forsake impossible aristocratic characters and melodramatic plots of amorous intrigue for accounts of ordinary people who behaved in a believable fashion. Lastly, the style and settings of the stories began to change. The authors wrote plain, idiomatic English, and their stories took place in a milieu of British domestic life, not in operatic lands of passion and violence. This is not to say that all early letter novels made all these changes at once; but a few of them did. Others progressed more hesitantly, but their improvement, particularly in the manipulation of letters, was striking. (Lindamira, in a modern edition, is an easily accessible example of the early improvement in epistolary fiction, but this novel was not unique in its day. Some works, in fact, displayed a far greater mastery of the epistolary technique in fiction, and integrated it more thoroughly with their structure.)

These novels originated in imitation of such highly successful translated works as the Portuguese Letters, the Turkish Spy, and Mme d'Aulnoy's Ingenious and Diverting Letters, but some of their most significant characteristics could not have come from Continental models. Popular and influential as the stories from France were, most of them were not of much literary value. They lacked plot and structure. The Portuguese Letters, the Five Love Letters Written by a Cavalier, and the Seven Portuguese Letters were designed after the same pattern—a series of passionate utterances without replies—and contained only a tiny amount of background, supplied in retrospect. We learn from the five original letters that the Nun saw the Cavalier from her balcony, that they fell in love, and that he deserted her when he returned to France. She speaks vaguely of her parents. She says that she has been made portress of the convent, and later that she has given the picture and gifts of her faithless lover to "Dona Brites" to be burned. She writes that the Cavalier's lieutenant is waiting to carry her message and that she has heard from him of her lover's being cast ashore by a storm at "Algarve."¹ She mentions "Emanuel" and "Francisque," but we do not even know who or what they are. This is all the background and setting the story has; what in our time has been called "the sense of place" is absent. While the cryptic references undeniably contribute to the realism of the letters, they do not give the figure of the Nun solidity. The "plot" of the story is nothing more than her vacillations between rage and lamentation, rejection and pleading. The letters tell a story which is all character—we see into the innermost recesses of the Nun's soul, perhaps, but we do not know what she had for dinner. There could scarcely be a better example of Aristotle's dictum that to string together a series of speeches expressive of character is not to make a tragedy.

The seven imitative letters written anonymously after the appearance of the first five are no better. They record the Nun's violent reactions to a series of minor vexations: the Cavalier has expressed the idea that her love might cool, she has seen him talking to another woman, he has been obliged to go away for a few days, and so forth. The Five Love Letters Written by a Cavalier make no advance in plotting or background; their author merely took care to pick up all the hints in the original five, since the Cavalier's letters are intended to represent replies. Emanuel and Francisque become "lacqueys,"² the Cavalier deprecates the Nun's protestations of humility and wonders how his letters can have miscarried, but the new set of letters makes no addition to the minimal setting the Nun's letters had provided. They are no more than mirror-images of the originals.

Other French novels in epistolary form were not much better as to setting. The anonymous Le Commerce galant, translated in 1686 as Loves Posie, consists of a long letter from Timander to Madame D., in which he inserts his correspondence with young Iris. The two exchange letters more as finger exercises in gallant correspondence than anything else; they "draw Deductions and Corollaries touching Love tenderness,"³ and that is nearly all. Timander's interpolated comments on the letters and on the adventures which befell the pair provide a little background. Iris complains that she is so strictly watched that writing is difficult; at length Timander goes to Paris to forget. These rudimentary hints are not developed in the twenty-seven letters into anything resembling a plot, and the "commerce galant" takes place in a nearly total vacuum. Boursault's and Crébillon's psychological novels, Treize letters amoureuses and Lettres de la Marquise de M*** au Comte de R***, developed the method of the Portuguese Lettres, but did not go far beyond it. They treated at great length and in great detail the mental anguish of the honnête femme who progresses from unruffled virtue to guilty love and then to repentance, but they were not enriched with background or important events. In the former the Lady of Quality experiences a long series of hopes, fears, and jealousies, tormenting herself all the while with imaginary apprehensions. The crescendo and decrescendo of her feelings are handled with skill and at such great length that the reader cannot help finding them credible, but external action is remarkably infrequent. The lady dissects her feelings on seeing her lover talking to another woman, agrees to meet him in the Tuileries gardens, and fears—needlessly, as it turns out—that her husband suspects her.⁴ Presently, her lover has to go to England, and she gradually and painfully reconciles herself to his absence. The reader does not even know whether the affair was consummated. The marchioness de M*** has an unfeeling and neglectful husband, and she yields to her lover after much soul-searching; her husband soon retires to his estates, and she has to accompany him. She repents, falls into a decline, and dies. But the bulk of the narrative is taken up with events of minimal importance, magnified in the marchioness' thoughts: visits postponed, remarks misunderstood, sudden and unfounded apprehensions.

These novels are diametrically opposed to the romances of adventure, in which plot predominated and characters were two dimensional; they represent a reaction against such types of fiction. But the reaction has gone too far. The plot has been so attenuated that it cannot be a framework for the story. The multitude of tiny glimpses of character assembled by the authors lacks the general outlines which would keep it from being a disorganized mass.

The problem is different with two other early and influential pieces of French epistolary fiction, the Turkish Spy and Mme d'Aulnoy's Ingenious and Diverting Letters. Both contain many well-told and interesting stories, but this does not make them novels. The Turk gives accounts of historical personages, intrigues, customs, and events and describes his own adventures and reactions; a few of his experiences are narrated at some length through a sequence of letters. But no element binds the whole rambling narrative together except the character of the Turk and his very miscellaneous adventures. These are not enough, because although the author (or translators) tried hard to make the Turk serve as a focus for the whole work, he did not develop or sustain his personality sufficiently for that purpose. The eight volumes contain long stretches in which the Turk scarcely appears among the essays and descriptions, and the relation disintegrates as a story. The Ingenious and Diverting Letters are a mixture of travel journal, "novels" supposed to be related by acquaintances made on the road, descriptions of places and people, and historical matter. The personality of the "writer" is spread—though thinly—over the entire tale, but the only integrating plot factor is the journey itself. This is not made to be of much importance; the reader does not know why the lady is going to Madrid or what she will do when she gets there. The accidents of the road are not woven together nor importantly connected with the writer's character. They are simply parts of a panorama that drifts by.

These, the most popular models on which English authors could base their early efforts at letter fiction, had much to offer in particularizing character and making discourse lifelike, but they provided no structure which could be imitated if a writer wished his story to hang together. It is to the credit of the English popular writers that they often planted their epistolary vignettes on solid ground and gave their characters something to do besides watch scenery or torment themselves on paper.

Purely epistolary tales varied in length and complexity. The simplest were the single short letters which appeared in miscellanies and periodicals. These might be of several kinds; in one of the favorites, the "my story" letter, the writer recounted the history of his or her life and usually concluded by drawing a moral or asking the "editor" for advice. Steele was particularly fond of this contrivance and used it in his appealing stories of distressed girls who had been inveigled into a life of sin. A particularly good example is his letter from "Octavia" in the Spectator, No. 322. The story is told without heroics, in plain and simple language: Octavia married secretly, but prudently secured a certificate of marriage. This was accidentally destroyed by fire through a boorish squire's practical joke; her husband immediately deserted her, and she was left in misery. Single letters might also tell gossipy stories concerning persons other than the writer or convey brief sketches of character and situation which could be made vivid by adapting the style to the writer's station or by putting him in a typical and amusing predicament, as Gildon did in his two miscellanies and Mrs. Haywood in her Spy upon the Conjurer. One of Gildon's letters, from a bawd to one of her colleagues, asks for advice in setting up a new establishment; two others present a ridiculous epistolary quarrel between a village schoolmaster and a gardener about the merits of their respective professions.⁵ The schoolmaster's letter is larded with absurd pedantries; the gardener's by contrast is illiterate but vigorous and (appropriately) earthy. Mrs. Haywood employed the ingenious device of having a group of type characters write letters to Mr. Duncan Campbell, the famous dumb seer of the 1720's, asking advice in a variety of amusing (and mostly amatory) perplexities. Two of the letters come from a servant girl named "Abigal Jump," who is precisely in Pamela's situation. Abigal, however, has more prudence than "vartue," and her principal concern is whether her master will continue to keep her once she has yielded. The style and sentiments of her letters give an economical and vivid sketch of her character and way of thinking:

Now, Sir, it is very hard to be in Place, and not give Content neither; and if I were sure, he would keep his Word, it should be the first Thing I would do: For you must know, Sir, the Talk of the World is nothing; and what need I care what any Body says, if I want for nothing. I don't see that any People are so much despis'd as the Poor; and if I have Money, I warrant you I shall find enough to respect me…. All that frights me is, that a young Woman of my Acquaintance went away in this manner with a Man, a little while ago, and he turn'd her off presently and left her as poor as Job.⁶

A similar method enlivened and unified Captain Charles Walker's Authentick Memoirs … of the Celebrated Sally Salisbury (1723). Fifteen long letters, in response, we are told, to a newspaper advertisement, from friends, customers, and victims of the celebrated courtesan, give lively accounts of her life, her behavior (she seems to have resembled Nell Gwyn in wit as in other ways), and her rapacity and lewdness. The documentary method not only allows Captain Walker to avoid telling a feigned story, but enhances the variety and interest of the collection. The correspondents both retail anecdotes and relate their own sad experiences, and while all are rueful, their styles and manners are well differentiated, and the letters are filled with vivid little scenes and dialogue.

The miscellany letters of Tom Brown and Ned Ward were of the same kind. They presented lively sketches of characters and situations, usually with considerable coarseness. But the importance of Brown and Ward to the history of letter fiction (and, it is thought, to the development of Addison and Steele) lies in the fact that their narratives were realistic, thoroughly British, and completely contemporary. They satirized beaux and fops, card-playing women, and stupid rural gentry in situations with which every reader was familiar.

With this foundation, the miscellany of short stories in letters was turned another way by Mrs. Elizabeth Singer Rowe.⁷ This lady, who combined strict piety with a good education, took advantage of the great popularity of epistolary miscellanies like Brown's to disseminate moral instruction. Her Friendship in Death (1728) was a series of "letters from the dead to the living," like his, but they described the pleasures of Paradise and the pains of Hell as felt by persons recently translated, who warned their freethinking friends in this world to prepare for a future life before it was too late. Her Letters Moral and Entertaining (1729 and later) was more successful as narrative. Some of its tales ran into sequences several letters long, and in its second and third parts she provided sequels to earlier letters. Reformed rakes told of their conversion, pious maidens fled the houses of atheistic relatives for rural innocence,⁸ and George Barnwells rebuked the Millwoods who had seduced them. Not all the stories are so forbidding as these summaries indicate; as Mrs. Rowe continued to write she began to inject a strain of gentle satire into her pious exhortations, even though their tone and purpose kept out any matter of sensational interest. One of her best tales is the "Six Letters from Laura to Aurelia." Laura, though virtuous, is in love with the giddy delights of the town, and she chafes when she has to accompany her brother to his country seat:

The Smell of Violets gives me the Hystericks; fresh Air murders me; my Constitution is not robust enough to bear it; the cooling Zephyrs will fan me into a Catarrh if I stay here much longer … Daylight … has in it something so common and vulgar, that it seems better for Peasants to make Hay in … than for the Use of People of Distinction.⁹

She is further perturbed by her brother's atheism and by finding his mistress established at the rural retreat. Presently, she becomes more adjusted to country life, aided by the presence of a "handsome Hermit" who plays the flute in a bower and reads Marcus Aurelius. Two plots now progress to their denouements. The brother repents, his reclaimed mistress is sent off to the protection of her good uncle, and the handsome hermit dies and appears to Laura in angelic form on the following night. Laura becomes resigned to a life of innocence and devotes herself to preparations for meeting the handsome hermit in a better world. We may find both the morals and the manners of these tales too ridiculous to be instructive, but Mrs. Rowe's contemporaries thought otherwise. Her letters went through many editions, and we have evidence that they were widely read and discussed; but more than this, some of them were incorporated in Arthur Masson's A Collection of Prose and Verse, a grammar-school reader highly esteemed throughout the century, and so contributed to the education of Robert Burns among others.¹⁰ …

Notes

¹ Most of these references are scattered through the fourth and fifth letters (as originally arranged).

²Five Love-Letters … with the Cavalier's Answers (1714), p. 54.

³Love's Posie (1686), p. 96.

⁴Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier (1724), pp. 22, 11, 31–32.

⁵The Post-Boy Rob'd of His Mail (1692), Letter CIII; The Post-Man Robb'd of His Mail (1719), Book III, Letters I and II. The bawd's letter is a translation.

⁶A Spy upon the Conjurer ("Campbell" ed., 1724), p. 198.

⁷ See the DNB article on Elizabeth Rowe; and Helen S. Hughes, "Elizabeth Rowe and the Countess of Hertford," PMLA, LIX (1944), 726–46.

⁸ As in the story of Rosalinda, one of Mrs. Rowe's better narratives, Letters Moral and Entertaining (1733), Part II, pp. 1–18. It has a sequel in Part III.

⁹Letters Moral and Entertaining, Part III, pp. 102–3. The tale covers pp. 101–29.

¹⁰ See David Daiches, "The Identity of Burns," Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan Dugald McKillop (Chicago, 1963), p. 324….