‘Spoken from the Impulse of the Moment’: Epistolarity, Sensibility, and Breath in Frances Burney’s Evelina

Skinner explores the neglected role of breath in the mapping and understanding of eighteenth-century sensibility. Thematically rich in their associations with body and spirit, life and death, breath and breathlessness are also woven into the stylistic particularities of both sentimental and epistolary fiction. Examination of the epistolarity of Evelina, and the dramatic use of dialogue Burney became known for, reveals breathlessness as the signifier of intense and instinctive moral discernment of the kind described by eighteenth-century philosophers such as Frances Hutcheson, complicating the view that the heroine of epistolary fiction more generally, and Evelina in particular, is purely passive. Instead, she emerges as actively involved in numerous scenarios that at once challenge her capacity for moral conduct and allow her to demonstrate her power to act.

Wuthering Heights and the Relics of the Epistolary Novel

This chapter argues that a novelistic version of sympathy negotiates transitions between oral, written, and printed texts in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The mode of vicarious narration that earlier chapters locate in the decline of epistolary fiction culminates in a logic of epistolarity that justifies this novel’s narrative form. Brontë’s novel also transforms Enlightenment conceptions of sympathy through the shared identity between Heathcliff and Catherine, which returns to the extremes of familial proximity and racial difference that trouble Enlightenment notions of sympathy: Heathcliff could just as easily be Catherine’s brother or a racial “other.” After explaining that she has “watched and felt” Heathcliff’s sorrows, Catherine declares “I am Heathcliff.” This assertion suggests an assimilation of radical otherness or a complete mirroring of the self in the familial other, as if to annihilate, through the experience of shared suffering, the boundary that separates sibling from stranger.

Vicarious Narratives

In 1759, Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments defines sympathy as a series of shifts in perspective by which one sees from a different point of view. British and French novels published over the following century redefine sympathy through narrative form—shifting perspectives or “stories within stories” in which one character adopts the voice and perspective of another. Fiction follows Smith’s emphasis on sympathy’s shifting perspectives, but this formal echo coincides with a challenge. For Smith and other Enlightenment philosophers, the experience of sympathy relies on human resemblance. In novels, by contrast, characters who are separated by nationality, race, or species experience a version of sympathy that struggles to accommodate such differences. Encounters between these characters produce shifts in perspective or framed tales as one character sympathizes with another and begins to tell his story, echoing Smith’s definition of sympathy in their form while challenging Enlightenment philosophy’s insistence on human resemblance. Works of sentimental and gothic fiction published between 1750 and 1850 generate a novelistic version of sympathy by manipulating traditional narrative forms (epistolary fiction, embedded tales) and new publication practices (the anthology, the novelistic extract). Second-hand stories transform the vocal mobility, emotional immediacy, and multiple perspectives associated with the declining genre of epistolary fiction into the narrative levels and shifting speakers of nineteenth-century frame tales. Vicarious Narratives argues that fiction redefines sympathy as the struggle to overcome difference through the active engagement with narrative—by listening to, retelling, and transcribing the stories of others.

Epistolary Fiction

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.

Epistolary Fiction

This chapter focuses on epistolary fiction. In epistolary fiction, stories unfold by means of letters exchanged among fictional correspondents. The governing pretence is that the letters that make up the work represent not fiction at all, but a real-life exchange among correspondents who do not expect their communications ever to become public; only later are the letters collated for publication, often not by the supposed letter writers themselves. Typically written in a moment-by-moment simple past or present progressive tense, stories in epistolary form tend to privilege scenes of intense emotion or suspense, when fictional letter writers are uncertain or confused and the way forward is not clear. There is no controlling narrative voice; the characters who contribute to the telling of the story are themselves trying to determine what particular events mean.

Conjuring Trauma with (Self)Derision: The African and African-American Epistolary Fiction

All the female narrators of the three stories examined here – So Long a Letter, The Color Purple, and Letters from France – suffer serious traumas attributable to their male counterparts. Thus as a healing process, letter-writing is an exercise in trust that traverses the distances between the addresser and the addressee. Blurring the lines in such a way results in an intimate narration of trauma that reads as a stream of consciousness, devoid of fear of judgment or retribution. This paper studies the literary device of derision coupled with a psycho-feminist analysis to retrace the thorny, cathartic journey of trauma victims from self-hate to self-acceptance and self-agency.

Zweig and the Chinese Love-Letter Fever

In the 1920s and 1930s China was swept by a “love-letter fever,” a craze for real and fictional romantic letters (qingshu). One of this trend’s most important representatives was the notoriously frivolous writer Zhang Yiping (1902-1946). This chapter places Zhang’s retranslation of Stefan Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman of 1933 against the background of the young Chinese Republic’s ongoing struggles for modernity, when a multitude of theories on literature and its social functions were competing with each other. It also shows how Zhang used the prestige of a European writer in his feud with Lu Xun (1881-1936), one of China’s most influential writers. Taking the Chinese discourses as a starting point, a close reading of Letter from an Unknown Woman concludes the chapter. Beyond the framework of epistolary fiction and the love-letter genre the work reveals complex narrative strategies and literary dimensions which significantly complicate existing interpretations of Zweig’s most famous novella.