This chapter examines epistolary fiction. The heyday of epistolary fiction, the novel told entirely or mostly in letters, stretched from the 1750s until the late 1790s, before it suffered abrupt decline and extinction. This pre-eminence is attributable to the century's well-documented investment in letter writing as the prime way of constituting the social and sociability, whether conceived as the private domain of the family or as the wider public sphere. A letter-writing and letter-publishing culture flourished in relation to economics, politics, religion, housekeeping, medicine, travel, and, especially, questions of conduct. Indeed, a new middle-class culture of writing was in the making, and letter writing and the depiction of letter writing played its own part in constructing that culture.
He wrote a letter home to myself: Tracing the epistolary in Damon Galgut’s ‘In a strange room’
