It’s hard to imagine, immersed as we are in a boundless sea of multimedia messaging (texts, emails, calls on mobile phones and landlines, regular postal delivery and various overnight delivery services, newspapers, their digital analogues and other online news sites, broadcast television, seasons of television on DVD or Blu-Ray or streamed via the Internet, paper books and digital books that we read on handheld devices, social media from Twitter to Snapchat), the profound importance, the all-purpose utility, the sheer omnipresence for Austen and her contemporaries of the ordinary letter. Both in Austen’s fiction and in her life, you get the sense that letters were often nearly everything, not least because a woman of modest means was unlikely to have independent control over her movements. Muddy roads, in the absence of a horse or carriage, could easily stop a genteel but income-constrained lady from walking even a few miles down the road to see a friend or relative, and unmarried adult women were often dispersed to relatives’ establishments to live, separated from their closest female companions for long spells and sometimes even for whole lifetimes: letters offered the only way of staying close to loved ones outside the house.

In Emma, the impoverished Jane Fairfax, destined to earn her living as a governess, insists on walking to the post office even in the rain to see if there are any letters waiting for her. Emma’s prosperous brother-in-law, John Knightley, tells the young woman that when she has lived to his age, she “will begin to think letters are never worth going through the rain for” (E II.16, 316), but Jane points out that once she is working as a governess, it is impossible that she will be “situated [as he is], in the midst of every dearest connection” (E II.16, 317). She does not expect, in other words, “that simply growing older should make me indifferent about letters”: “You have every body dearest to you always at hand, I, probably, never shall again,” she concludes forcefully; “and therefore till I have outlived all my affections, a post-office, I think, must always have power to draw me out, in worse weather than to-day” (E II.16, 317).

The letters of Austen’s own that survive, out of a much larger number written in the novelist’s lifetime, are not especially emotionally forthcoming. That may have less to do with Austen’s temperament and relationships than with the ideas about privacy and decorum that governed her sister Cassandra’s choice of which letters to keep and which to destroy after the writer’s death. There are about a hundred and sixty of Austen’s letters in the standard edition of her correspondence. Austen’s niece Caroline speculated that Jane’s letters to Cassandra (the two sisters were regularly separated in adulthood, most often when one or the other sister went for an extended stay in a married brother’s household) “were, I dare say, open and confidential—My Aunt looked them over and burnt the greater part, (as she told me), 2 or 3 years before her own death—She left, or gave some as legacies to the Nieces—but of those that I have seen, several had portions cut out” (MJA 174).

The tone of the letters we do have is gossipy, affectionate, satirical and rarely deep, reflecting often on the practice of letter-writing itself. In one early letter to Cassandra, Austen observes: “I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth; I have been talking to you almost as fast as I could the whole of this letter” (JAL 71). This language conveys both a joke about a silly piece of conventional wisdom (the true art of letter-writing surely extends further than mimicking face-to-face speech) and a deeper insight about the fact that writing a letter to someone one cares about can produce a feeling of closeness or intimacy. There is a good deal of comic throat-clearing around the question of how to write a decently long letter when you have nothing much to report, and questions of equity and reciprocity in letter-length also loom large: to her dear friend Martha Lloyd, in response to a “long Letter,” which she claims was “valued as it ought” (JAL 216), Austen writes a lengthy response that concludes, “Now I think I may in Quantity have deserved your Letter. My ideas of Justice in Epistolary Matters are you know very strict” (JAL 217).

Roads were extended and improved throughout the eighteenth century in England, and river navigation acts and new canals improved the efficiency of water transport; stagecoaches made it easier not just for people but also for their letters and packages to be transported between different parts of the country, and as the British empire expanded overseas, so did incentives to find ways of allowing family members and business associates separated by great distances to correspond without untoward delays.¹ But though postal service became much faster, it wouldn’t become cheap in Britain until the introduction of a national penny post in 1840. In Austen’s time, postage was still expensive enough that if you could get someone to carry your letter to its destination as a favor, you would very likely do so. The cost of postage, which was paid by the recipient rather than the sender, could also be avoided by using a so-called frank, allowed to members of Parliament for free postage; though it was illegal to share these, they were widely distributed to friends and relatives.

Allusions to the material details of transmission often form part of letters both real and fictional: “I had sent off my Letter yesterday before Yours came, which I was sorry for,” writes Austen; “but as Eliza has been so good as to get me a frank, your questions shall be answered without much further expense to you” (JAL 193). This sort of context will help the reader of the novels decode allusions that otherwise might pass without notice. In Persuasion, when Anne Elliot’s sister, writing from the country, says she can make her letter as long as she likes because a neighbor has offered to carry anything she wishes to Anne in Bath (P II.6, 178), she is referring to the fact that since the letter isn’t traveling by official channels, Anne won’t have to pay extra postage, which was then charged per sheet rather than by weight. There is a good deal of joking around this sort of question in Austen’s own letters: “It is throwing a Letter away to send it by a visitor, there is never convenient time for reading it–& Visitor can tell most things as well.—I had thought with delight of saving you the postage—but Money is Dirt” (JAL 256). Money was not really dirt: both Austen and her characters preferred to save the postage when they could.

Austen wrote with a quill pen whose nib she would periodically have dipped into an inkwell to fill; she used iron gall ink, which could easily be transported as a powder and mixed when needed.² Her niece Caroline later recalled that “every note and letter of hers, was finished off handsomely—There was an art then in folding and sealing—no adhesive envelopes made all easy—some people’s letters looked always loose and untidy—but her paper was sure to take the right folds, and her sealing wax to drop in the proper place—” (MJA 171). Writing in those days was sometimes accommodated by way of furniture tailor-made for the purpose: there is a record of Austen’s father purchasing in December 1794, probably for his daughter’s nineteenth birthday and at a cost of twelve shillings, “a small Mahogany Writing Desk with 1 Long Drawer and Glass Ink Stand Compleat,” which seems to be the desk that survives as a family heirloom and is now owned by the British Library (FR 89).

Modern editors of eighteenth-century letters will often give information about the physical nature of manuscripts as they encountered them in libraries and archives. Not all letters are transcribed from originals in the author’s own hand; they might be copies made by friends or relations or heavily edited versions, published in an earlier era, of original texts that are now lost. The technical nomenclature (seal, wafer, watermark) may be evocative, but it doesn’t necessarily convey the glorious materiality of eighteenth-century letters as their original readers would have experienced them. The size, texture and overall quality of the paper would have told a recipient a good deal about what kind of a letter she was getting, as would the handwriting and the closeness with which the sheet was written. Adopting mourning dress for close family members didn’t just involve wearing black clothes, it had an analog for self-presentation in writing: “I have forgotten to take a proper-edged sheet of Paper,” writes Austen in a letter composed just after her uncle’s death, alluding to the practice of using paper with a black border in a mourning household (JAL 355).

Covering a sheet of paper with writing and then turning it upside down or sideways and writing between the lines (“crossing”) was also common, not just because paper was expensive but due to the high cost of postage. In this sense, writing “closely” isn’t just a question of manners or decorum (respecting one’s correspondent and presenting oneself formally in writing), it actually helps keep down the recipient’s postage costs. A long letter might be seen as a gesture of simultaneous generosity and aggression, or at the very least carelessness, just as a letter with relatively few words on the page might not seem to give good value for money: “Your close-written letter makes me quite ashamed of my wide lines,” Austen writes (JAL 157). In Emma, the voluble Miss Bates says of her niece Jane’s letter – the letter that Emma resists having to hear read aloud – that she “really must, in justice to Jane, apologise for her writing so short a letter—only two pages you see—hardly two—and in general she fills the whole paper and crosses half” (E II.1, 168). Her elderly mother, Miss Bates adds, calls it “chequer-work,” a little joke that conveys something of the heart and soul that are poured into these meticulously textured missives.

Jane Fairfax’s letters are regularly shared with as many other members of the village as will stop to listen to them, and the communal nature, in this period, of a letter’s audience – it is rarely written exclusively for the attention of the person whose name features as addressee – is very striking. Pride and Prejudice gives another instance of how much the sharing of letters would have been thought of as a default mode rather than an anomaly. Lydia’s letters home from Brighton “were always long expected, and always very short” – these are the letters written to her mother and then shared with the rest of the family – “and from her correspondence with her sister,” the narrator adds, “there was still less to be learnt—for her letters to Kitty, though rather longer, were much too full of lines under the words to be made public” (PP II.19, 264). This may not refer to underlining for emphasis, although Austen herself does sometimes underline for that reason in her own letters, but rather to a simple code in which the letter-writer would underline certain letters and words to pick out a “secret” message, one safeguard for privacy in a world where letters were usually shared among family members once they had been read by their initial addressee.

Both gender and social class can be thought of as having pronounced effects on the style of a letter and the forms it might take, though the generalizations Austen’s characters make about how people write letters are usually more humorous than apt. In Northanger Abbey, when Henry Tilney claims (it is a form of flirtation) “that the usual style of letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars” (NA I.3, 20), Catherine falls for the conversational lure. She asks what those particulars are, and is told by Henry: “A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.” Women are supposed to write longer and fuller but also more trivial letters than men because their male counterparts are living busier lives in the world and accordingly have less time and inclination to write copiously, but when Mary Crawford asserts, in Mansfield Park, that brothers’ letters are overly laconic, the often reticent Fanny Price registers a strong dissent: when brothers are “at a distance from all their family,” she insists, “they can write long letters” (MP I.6, 70). Fanny’s own brother William is a midshipman serving overseas in the Navy, so that the two siblings’ correspondence has served for many years as their sole means of retaining intimacy, just as it did for Austen herself and the two brothers of hers who went into the navy. In Emma, farmer Robert Martin proposes marriage to Harriet Smith by letter; Emma doesn’t want Harriet to marry Robert Martin (she is sure Harriet can do better), but she is taken aback when Harriet shows her the letter. It is such a very good letter – manly, open, honest, plainspoken – that she disingenuously suggests to Harriet that his sisters must have helped him write it (E I.7, 53).

We need not think about Austen’s time as being at great historical distance from our own in order to understand the ways that a letter may sometimes have greater communicative power than speech. Many of us find that we are able to be more honest, to reveal vulnerabilities and share our most private concerns, more easily in writing than in face-to-face conversation, with a safety net coming into being when physical presence is taken altogether out of the question. The conclusion of Persuasion provides a lovely instance of writing allowing a person to speak more directly and openly even than speech itself. Captain Wentworth proposes to Anne Elliot by way of a letter written desperately, passionately while in her immediate physical presence and during a conversation she is having with another man about differences in how men and women experience love and the passage of time. (I will have more to say about this scene in Chapter 3, “Revision.”)

Of course, we also sometimes inappropriately fall back on writing rather than speech because we are afraid of how the other person will respond to what we wish to convey, and Austen is extremely sensitive to the nuances of such tensions. Edmund Bertram, quite unsure as to whether or not Mary Crawford will accept his proposal of marriage, writes in a letter to Fanny Price that in preference either to visiting Mary in London where she is now staying (her frivolous surroundings there don’t favor serious Edmund’s solemn suit) or to waiting to propose in person when she comes back to the country in the summer,

But Austen has been sly in creating this letter. We discern strong elements of indecision and even of rationalization in Edmund’s words; each assertion, even as it is expressed, exposes itself as wishful thinking and opens up a keen awareness for the reader of the possibility that the opposite is true. When Edmund says, after another swathe of agonizing oscillation back and forth, “I think I shall certainly write” (MP III.13, 491), we can hear the oxymoron in the wording (the uncertainty of “think” unsuccessfully countered by the false sureness of “certainty”) even more strongly than we did in that opening (“nearly determined”).

Here is another, more elaborate scene in which Austen explores the relationship between convention and feeling in letter-writing. Look at the progression that takes place in this passage from Mansfield Park:

The term “common-place” here doesn’t mean ordinary; it refers to the rhetorical technique of “commonplacing” – offering a moral platitude or apothegm of some kind that is then “amplified” or developed in a formulaic manner. This is why “a very little matter was enough for her”: writing in this mode is less about transmitting information or feelings than about rehearsing platitudes and recapitulating various forms of conventional wisdom, pious or otherwise. Austen’s irony here is affectionate rather than ruthless, I would say, with the humor coming gently rather than savagely at Lady Bertram’s expense.

The irony turns darker, though, in the sentences that follow. “There was a rich amends, however, preparing for her,” the narrator comments, with Lady Bertram’s “hour of good luck” coming when there is “some very alarming intelligence” to “communicate” (MP III.13, 493). The oldest Bertram son, Tom, has fallen very ill at his friends’ house, but even such a high-quality piece of news goes through the sausage-making machine of Lady Bertram’s amplifying style, and Austen has fun producing a long passage of pastiche or parody of a style that is superficial, formal, virtually without feeling. “Fanny’s feelings on the occasion were indeed considerably more warm and genuine than her aunt’s style of writing,” the narrator continues (MP III.13, 495), but in the meantime Lady Bertram continues to pass on her other son’s accounts of Tom’s illness to Fanny

It takes the sharp shock of Tom’s actual appearance to let real feeling break through the shell of Lady Bertram’s manner.

Letters may also reveal things that their authors don’t intend. A good example of this can be found in Mr. Collins’ letters in Pride and Prejudice, where Austen allows the letter-writer to condemn himself in his own words for comic effect. Mr. Bennet’s heartless amusement at Mr. Collins’ expense models the reader’s own distaste: “There is a mixture of servility and self-importance in his letter,” he comments to Elizabeth, “which promises well” (PP I.13, 71). Another correspondent seen to reveal her true self in her letters is Lucy Steele in Sense and Sensibility. Lucy’s letters also let Austen show us the potential for a letter that purports to be written to one person to be really designed to reach a different reader’s eyes. News has broken of Lucy’s secret longtime engagement to Edward Ferrars, with whom Elinor Dashwood is in love, and Lucy writes a distinctly passive-aggressive letter to Elinor in which she exults over her in the guise of thanking her for standing by Lucy in the wake of the unpopular revelation. Lucy is also angling, though, for assistance (financial or otherwise) from Elinor’s host, Mrs. Jennings, and when Elinor finishes reading the letter, “she performed what she concluded to be its writer’s real design, by placing it in the hands of Mrs. Jennings, who read it aloud with many comments of satisfaction or praise” (SS III.2, 315).

This scene also demonstrates the ways in which individual readers’ responses to a given letter tell us a great deal about them. Mrs. Jennings’ noncritical and approving comments on Lucy’s manipulative letter reveal a significant disparity of taste and judgment between Elinor and herself, with Elinor’s own greater awareness of the letter’s falseness and hidden agendas strongly framing the letter for the reader. The shameless or brazen quality of Lucy’s letter-writing voice may come through most clearly in the brief and explicit letter she sends Edward at the end of the novel, after she has married his brother instead. It is full of sentimental clichés (“I scorn to accept a hand while the heart was another’s”) and relies on a slangy shorthand (“Sincerely wish you happy in your choice”) that is in marked contrast to the finer decorum of the Dashwood sisters’ epistolary manner (SS III.13, 413). Edward comments wryly to Elinor that “this is the only letter I ever received from her, of which the substance made me any amends for the defect of the style” (SS III.13, 414).

Another example of the ways that letter-writing can be used instrumentally to draw out and develop observations about character comes in a well-known scene near the opening of Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennet is staying at Netherfield Park while her sister is ill, and she and the other members of the party spend the evening together in the drawing room pursuing their own separate activities. Mr. Darcy is writing a letter to his sister, and Miss Bingley, who wishes he would pay more attention to her, is “watching the progress of his letter, and repeatedly calling off his attention by messages to his sister” (PP I.10, 51). Elizabeth watches their interactions with amusement (the third-person narrative voice here is strongly colored by Elizabeth’s perspective and point of view): “The perpetual commendations of the lady either on his hand-writing, or on the evenness of his lines, or on the length of his letter, with the perfect unconcern with which her praises were received, formed a curious dialogue, and was exactly in unison with her opinion of each” (PP I.10, 51).

Now that they are talking about letters, their host, Mr. Bingley, makes this assertion about his own style of writing. His sister has claimed that he “writes in the most careless way imaginable. He leaves out half his words, and blots the rest” (PP I.10, 52), but he puts a different spin on the matter: “My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them,” he says, “—by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents” (PP I.10, 52). Elizabeth claims to find Bingley’s humility disarming, but Darcy offers a counter-suggestion that the appearance of humility can often conceal an indirect boast: “you are really proud of your defects in writing,” he tells his friend, “because you consider them as proceeding from a rapidity of thought and carelessness of execution, which if not estimable, you think at least highly interesting” (PP I.10, 53). He goes on to suggest that Bingley overrates the “power of doing any thing with quickness,” citing as evidence his friend’s own comment that if he ever decides to leave Netherfield he will be gone in five minutes, which Darcy says is not the “sort of panegyric, of compliment” that Bingley intends. Darcy adds, moreover, that he is not convinced Bingley would leave so quickly if a friend asked him to stay, and the yielding quality (based on trust and affection) that they all discern in Bingley will become an important plot point when we learn of Bingley’s abrupt departure from Netherfield and, later on, of the part Darcy played in convincing his friend to go. All this characterization of the differences between the two friends, up to and including the foreshadowing of events to come, is occasioned by the initial scene of letter-writing.

Letters are not just crude instruments of character; there are other ways in which they transmit meanings to a perceptive reader that may not have been fully legible even to the letter-writer him- or herself. A series of letters can become an especially powerful lens for understanding a person’s feelings as they may have changed over time. When Elizabeth revisits the question of what effect disappointment in the wake of Bingley’s abrupt departure has had on her sister, she rereads the letters Jane has written her over the past months:

This is an example of how what is not said in a letter may be as significant as the words that do appear on the page.

Here is another example that shows how it may be a formal or superficial aspect of the letter, not its substance as such, that serves as the primary agent of meaning. Emma’s Mr. Woodhouse is unable to keep to the point, and the modern reader might easily dismiss his comment in this instance as an irrelevancy, but when Mr. Woodhouse says of Frank Churchill’s letter to his father and stepmother that “it was an exceeding good, pretty letter, and gave Mr. and Mrs. Weston a great deal of pleasure. I remember it was written from Weymouth, and dated Sept. 28^th—and began, ‘My dear Madam,’ but I forget how it went on; and it was signed ‘F.C. Weston Churchill.’—I remember that perfectly” (E I.11, 103), he is not merely rambling. His daughter Isabella, though she is not a creature of intellectual sharpness, responds, “How very pleasing and proper of him!” – which is to say that the gesture of signing himself with his birth father’s name as well as the name of his wealthier adoptive family itself may be the most signal piece of intelligence transmitted, a meaningful gesture of goodwill.

Another important way in which letters transmit meaning concerns not only what they say and don’t say but the very fact of correspondence, which in certain circumstances itself becomes an important piece of information. This is partly a question of manners – decorum strongly held in this period that unmarried young women of a certain social class should not correspond with men outside the family unless and until they were actually promised to each other in marriage, with the approval of both sets of parents – but it also has a distinguished literary history. Richardson’s influential and immensely popular epistolary novel Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (1748) is concerned among other things to suggest that Clarissa’s initial agreement to correspond with Lovelace contains the seed of her ultimate downfall. Lovelace has insinuated himself into the position of correspondent because Clarissa’s uncle has asked Lovelace to write a series of letters to serve as a relative’s guide for the Grand Tour, the trip that young men of means would take during this period to see the society and art of the continent. Clarissa tells her friend and chief correspondent, Anna Howe, that Lovelace “consented, on condition that I would direct his subjects, as he called it” (this passage also has the advantage of showing the ways in which a correspondence might have the same kind of entertainment value that we would now associate with a book, a magazine or a television series):

Clarissa’s explanations sound a little strained – they have the air of rationalization – and Anna remonstrates in response that by the sheer fact of corresponding with him at all, Clarissa has rendered herself vulnerable:

Anna’s language powerfully conflates Lovelace, the correspondence and the secret into one dangerous knot of transgression.

Critic Tom Keymer has written especially well about the ways the letter in this period could be seen as completely transparent, completely manipulative or falling at any point on the spectrum between those two poles.⁴ Epistolary fictions – novels written in the form of a series of letters – can be found earlier as well, but it was Richardson who consolidated the form of the epistolary novel at mid-century and proselytized successfully for its powers. His first novel, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), was hugely popular, but it also provoked a backlash from readers who felt that the heroine was too good to be true, manipulative rather than honest, a schemer (Henry Fielding’s parody, Shamela (1741), perfectly captures the key elements of the hostile take on Pamela’s modes of writing about herself). It was neither Pamela nor Clarissa but Richardson’s final novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753), that was Austen’s favorite (it was also favored by many other writers of the period, including historian Edward Gibbon). “Her knowledge of Richardson’s works was such as no one is likely again to acquire,” Austen’s nephew wrote in his memoir of her: “Every circumstance narrated in Sir Charles Grandison, all that was ever said or done in the cedar parlour, was familiar to her; and the wedding days of Lady L. and Lady G. were as well remembered as if they had been living friends” (MJA 71).

Marianne Dashwood is the character of Austen’s who most narrowly escapes something like Clarissa’s tragic fate; another young woman in Sense and Sensibility, the ward of Colonel Brandon (we don’t meet her directly), is indeed seduced and abandoned by Marianne’s lover Willoughby, who reads like a sort of late-stage reimagining of Richardson’s Lovelace. Although Marianne’s rash entrance into a correspondence with the man she loves derives most immediately from her unwillingness to obey conventions she deems meaningless, the novel taken as a whole seems to confirm the argument that even a convention that appears outdated or unnecessary can sometimes be defended on the grounds of its power to limit our own emotional vulnerability. Marianne regularly accuses Elinor of being overly conventional or scrupulous, but the novel aligns pretty strongly with the older sister’s point of view on this matter. It is emotionally risky for Marianne to send a letter to a man to whom she is not engaged, and Willoughby’s failure to respond to her letters has the painful quality of what we might call in our own time “blanking” or “ghosting” (SS II.4, 188).

In this scene, Elinor and her sister Marianne have just arrived in town and are both writing letters. Elinor, not so much probing for information as thinking pragmatically about news to be reported and the economizing of writerly effort, suggests that since she herself is writing to their mother just now, Marianne might delay her own letter home:

To Elinor, in other words, more prudent than her sister, the mere fact of a correspondence between Marianne and Willoughby must mean that they have become engaged without telling anyone else. Shortly after this scene, when Colonel Brandon sees a letter in the servant’s hand “directed to Mr. Willoughby in [Marianne’s] writing,” he too assumes that a correspondence signifies an engagement: “I came to inquire,” he says to Elinor, “but I was convinced before I could ask the question. Is every thing finally settled? Is it impossible to—? But I have no right, and I could have no chance of succeeding” (SS II.5, 197).

Austen loved Richardson, but she was also stylistically indebted to Fielding, whose morals were considered less respectable than Richardson’s but who was one of the eighteenth century’s great comic writers, and it is chiefly in the mode of parody that we find the novel of letters affecting Austen’s choices as a young writer. The set of stories we refer to as the juvenilia or early works survives in fair copies contained in three volumes, and gives a fascinating window into Austen’s literary concerns in the years of her childhood and adolescence. A number of her short early fictions, including “Love and Freindship” and “Lesley Castle,” are written in an epistolary format, a mode invoked during this stage of Austen’s writing life less for melodrama or tragedy than for satire predominantly. Lady Susan represents a more extended and consistent epistolary fiction than either of those two others. It is slightly reminiscent of Laclos’ novel Dangerous Liaisons (1782), although there is no evidence that Austen read that novel, whose deeply scandalous sexual subject matter would have made it difficult for a country parson’s daughter to get her hands on it: though it is certainly a moralist’s treatment of adulterous sex rather than a celebration of libertine morality, one of the novel’s most memorable scenes involves the libertine Valmont writing that he has used the naked body of the woman he’s in bed with “as a desk on which to write to my beautiful devotee.”⁵

The title character of Lady Susan is a Machiavellian schemer whose self-serving machinations know no bounds. Only her sister-in-law seems to see through her, and the comedy of the letters often arises from the sharp juxtaposition of Lady Susan’s account of her own actions with descriptions of those same actions provided by a hostile onlooker. Lady Susan herself speaks of her sister-in-law Mrs. Vernon as follows (this brief passage will show both the maddening narcissism and the real charm of Lady Susan’s letter-writing style):

After an implausibly fast-paced series of flirtations and rapprochements – speeding things up is one way of producing a sharply satirical or comic effect, a key tactic for Fielding in Shamela – the sequence of letters breaks off at a point well short of what would have constituted a full-length novel. It is hard to know whether Austen had become impatient with the story or simply with the mode of narration: “This Correspondence,” interrupts a hitherto unknown narrator, “by a meeting between some of the Parties & a separation between the others, could not, to the great detriment of the Post office Revenue, be continued longer” (LM 75).

Though all six of Austen’s published novels are narrated in the third person, two of them were probably initially drafted in the epistolary mode, as novels written in letters. These are Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, and the last part of this chapter will concentrate on a few moments when the underlying epistolary scaffolding seems to obtrude through each story as we now experience it. There are complex tradeoffs for a novelist choosing between these two modes of narration: the epistolary mode has immediacy on its side, allowing the reader an immersive identification with the novel’s characters in the role of addressee especially (we read a letter just as it would have been read by its recipient), while third-person narration has much greater advantages in the way of perspective, contextualization and summing up, letting the writer claim the authority of an impartial historian rather than being implicated as a potentially biased player in the events at hand.

The culture, too, was moving away from the epistolary mode over Austen’s own reading lifetime. James Raven observes that between 1750 and 1760 new novels in letters averaged roughly a tenth of each year’s total new fiction, “but by 1766 and 1768 nearly one quarter annually and in 1769 more than one third of all new novel titles were epistolary”: it would go on to be the case that at least thirty percent of novels published between 1770 and 1790 were in letters, and in certain years the proportion reached as high as two-thirds.⁶ Raven says that the turning point seems to have come around 1791, and that by the final few years of the century, “the epistolary form had lost its popularity, swamped, it seems by the diversity and directness of new historical and Gothic narratives that were not well-suited to relation by imaginary letters.”

Perhaps the clearest legacy of Sense and Sensibility’s previous life as a novel written mostly or entirely in letters can be seen in the extent to which the central dramatic encounter in the first half of the novel – Marianne Dashwood’s rejection by Willoughby – comes chiefly by way of the reader gaining access to the letters the two have exchanged. Marianne has come from the country largely to facilitate her reunion with the man she loves, and she begins by sending him several short letters to let him know she is in town. Still not having heard back from him, she spots Willoughby at a party and makes herself known, but rather than responding warmly to her greeting, he acknowledges her only with distance and coldness (SS II.6, 200–01). The sequel to this scene of rebuff comes not long after, in the privacy of the sisters’ bedroom at Mrs. Jennings’ house. At breakfast, Elinor sees Marianne receive a letter and run from the room; when she follows and opens the door, she finds Marianne “stretched on the bed, almost choked by grief, one letter in her hand, and two or three others lying by her” (SS II.7, 207). It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that in Austen’s world we experience our most intense sorrows in privacy and via the medium of the letter.

Marianne now passes the sheaf of letters to Elinor and we read them with her. First there is Willoughby’s cold rejection, whose language strikes Elinor as almost unbelievable:

Then, with Elinor, we read the sequence of earlier letters that fills in the backstory, Marianne’s brief affectionate notes letting Willoughby know she is in town: the first is confident, the second disappointed, the third devastated following the encounter at the party (SS II.7, 212–13). But Elinor’s sympathy for her sister – her ability to feel her sister’s pain – doesn’t prevent her from having reservations about the correspondence having come about in the first place:

The most pressing underlying rationale for punctilio or decorum may depend on emotional self-protection: Elinor is desperate for Marianne to become more prudent not primarily because self-exposure attracts the negative attention of others, though that is also a legitimate concern, but because having others witness our emotional pain only exacerbates and deepens it.

In Pride and Prejudice, the scene in which Darcy proposes to Elizabeth Bennet, though it possesses its own dramatic intensity, is characterized by miscommunication rather than perfect understanding. It is the letter Elizabeth receives from Darcy in the chapter following that has the far more profound effect on her intellect and emotions, and it is felt by many readers that Elizabeth’s reading of the letter – and the feelings and thoughts she experiences in its aftermath – constitutes the novel’s emotional fulcrum. Darcy hands the letter to Elizabeth in person after finding her on her walk in the park at Rosings; it is “an envelope containing two sheets of letter paper, written quite through, in a very close hand.—The envelope itself was likewise full” (PP II.12, 218). This is an unexpectedly long letter, in other words, and it is also a document that will plunge Elizabeth into confusion and uncertainty: “Her feelings as she read were scarcely to be defined,” says the narrator (PP II.13, 226). That phrase “scarcely to be defined” may sound to modern ears merely noncommittal, but it would have had the connotation for contemporary readers of something genuinely too intense and bewildering to be put into language.

What the letter asserts about the history of Bingley’s relationship with Jane Bennet seems unforgivable to Elizabeth – “It was all pride and indolence,” notes the narrator, in a nice instance of the stylistic device called free indirect style, which is to say that we are hearing Elizabeth’s own thought as it has migrated into an unmarked third-person voice – but she is able to read the account of Wickham’s history with clearer attention. Her initial response is to put the letter aside, “protesting that she would not regard it, that she would never look in it again” (PP II.13, 227), but “in half a minute the letter was unfolded again, and collecting herself as well as she could, she again began the mortifying perusal of all that related to Wickham, and commanded herself so far as to examine the meaning of every sentence” (PP II.13, 227). After reading and rereading the particulars of the transactions, Elizabeth faces a conundrum:

The letter can be seen in this as in many other instances to be susceptible of kinds of honesty and truthfulness that social interactions are more likely to conceal than expose.

It is largely Wickham’s personal charm of manner that has allowed him to make such a very good impression on Elizabeth, though when she reconsiders her conversations with him she is “now struck with the impropriety of such communications to a stranger, and wondered it had escaped her before” (PP II.13, 229). Similarly, when Elizabeth revisits what Darcy has said about Jane, especially his expressed conviction that Jane wasn’t in love with Bingley (an opinion supported by an independent observation made by Charlotte Lucas about Jane’s calmness of manner and its potential for misconstrual), her ideas are turned upside down:

Letters in Pride and Prejudice facilitate not just emotional change but also more traditional forms of plot development. As the novel moves into its final phase, Elizabeth receives two letters from her sister, one of which has been missent elsewhere because the address (the “direction,” to use Austen’s nomenclature) had been written “remarkably ill” (PP III.4, 301). This is itself already a signal to Elizabeth that something must be wrong at home, and indeed what begins as an ordinary letter (we are not given the actual text) is supplemented by a second half, “dated a day later, and written in evident agitation” (PP III.4, 301), which tells Elizabeth that their sister Lydia has eloped with Wickham. Elizabeth feels personally responsible for this development, and when Darcy finds her shortly afterward, she tells him everything: “When I consider … that I might have prevented it!—I who knew what he was. Had I but explained some part of it only—some part of what I learnt, to my own family! Had his character been known, this could not have happened. But it is all, all too late now” (PP III.4, 305–06). Thus the arrival of the letter, and the immediate distress into which it casts Elizabeth, provides the occasion for Elizabeth to confess to Darcy that she has come to believe what he wrote in his earlier letter, and to confide that her orientation to him now differs markedly from before. Elizabeth does not reveal all her feelings to Darcy at this juncture, but she admits them to herself with a striking degree of honesty (the third-person narrator has full access to her thoughts and emotions): “never had she so honestly felt that she could have loved him, as now, when all love must be vain” (PP III.4, 306), observes the narrator, a feeling that prompts Elizabeth to throw “a retrospective glance over the whole of their acquaintance, so full of contradictions and varieties, sigh[ing] at the perverseness of those feelings which would now have promoted its continuance, and would formerly have rejoiced in its termination” (PP III.4, 307).

The denouements of the last volume continue to depend on letters, which offer a high degree of economy for storytelling: there is Lydia’s thoughtless letter in the wake of her elopement, and everything it reveals about her character and attitudes (PP III.5, 321), Mr. Bennet’s failure to keep everyone up to date on news (“His family knew him to be on all common occasions, a most negligent and dilatory correspondent, but at such a time, they had hoped for exertion” (PP III.6, 324)), the odious letter from Mr. Collins (“The death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison of this” (PP III.6, 327)), Mr. Gardiner’s more level-headed and exhaustive account of the current situation, the exchange of letters between Elizabeth and her aunt when Lydia (now home) drops a hint accidentally of Mr. Darcy’s presence at the wedding – and finally a comic sequence of letters in conclusion.

The first, given in full, is from Elizabeth to her aunt; the second, its text omitted, from Mr. Darcy to his aunt; and the last (and shortest one quoted) is from Mr. Bennet to Mr. Collins. It recounts the news of Elizabeth’s engagement to Darcy and concludes, “Console Lady Catherine as well as you can. But, if I were you, I would stand by the nephew. He has more to give” (PP III.18, 424). The letter, then, in this last stretch of the novel seems to have become a sort of universal tool for the novelist, a powerful and highly economical instrument for storytelling whose integration into third-person narration, sometimes in direct quotation but also often in summary or paraphrase, represents an essential component of Austen’s fictional technique.