The Introduction, ‘Thinking Letterworlds’, makes the case for reading the letter-writing of major modern artists and authors through the prism of their everyday lived experience. Whilst the creativity of Mallarmé, Van Gogh, Morisot, Cézanne, and Zola reaches deep into our cultural imaginary, their letter-writing on matters of physical and mental health, daily habits, community, leisure, solitude, ethics, and material culture is rarely studied in its own right. The book’s aims are thus outlined: to develop an integrative and comparative approach to reading letters through selected approaches in modern critical thought; to explore the deeper narrative of everyday preoccupations in letter-writing; to bring fresh critical attention to the expressivity of everyday letters by examining modes of realism, irony, metaphoricity, and fantasy; to advance a critical redistribution of literary value that recognises the creativity of everyday letter-writing; to consider how letter-writing of the past resonates with readers today in its concerns with the lived body, with subjectivity and social relations, with pressures of work, and with the intermittences of private life.