A Brief History of the Epistolary Novel
My new book, Letters to the Purple Satin Killer, comes out August 6 from CLASH Books. It is a dark, satirical novel about a serial killer serving out his sentence on death row. It explores the aftermath of his gruesome crimes and the psychological trauma of those who lived through them. To firmly entrench the narrative in the POV of those affected, I chose to write it in the epistolary format.
Even if you don’t immediately recognize the word epistolary, you probably know what it means. In fact, you’ve probably read an epistolary novel or two without even realizing it.
Merriam-Webster defines epistolary as something related to or contained within a letter, or a composition consisting of a series of letters. It is derived from the term epistle, which refers to a letter written to a particular person or group, such as the epistles of St. Paul that make up a large part of the New Testament.
So yeah, Letters to the Purple Satin Killer is a novel that takes the form of letters written to a serial killer. It’s all right there in the title.
There are three main types of epistolary novels: monophonic, which feature a single voice, or letters written by a single character; dialogic, which feature a correspondence between two characters; and polyphonic, which feature letters written by three or more characters. This is the category my book falls into. In addition to letters, the modern epistolary novel can also incorporate newspaper clippings, diary entries, documents of public record, interview transcripts, and other scholarly ephemera.
So where did this style originate?
Epistolography, or the art of letter writing, was considered the height of creativity during the early Byzantine, having supplanted the oral tradition in the time of Cicero despite people’s distrust of “new technology.” In fact, antecedents of the earliest novels were just collections of letters written by notable thinkers who led interesting lives. Over time these collections were curated to include more of a narrative, injecting an element of “fiction” into previously formless accounts of everyday existence. These revisions were often romantic in nature, possibly the earliest examples of the shoehorning of subplots, but that’s a subject for another essay.
Jumping ahead a few centuries, the first English novel to be composed entirely of letters is generally considered to be Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, published anonymously in 1684 and credited to a playwright named Aphra Behn. Still, the epistolary novel wouldn’t really come into its own until the mid-18th century, due to the publication of two immensely popular novels by Samuel Richardson: Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded in 1740 and Clarissa: or The History of A Young Lady in 1748. Richardson’s work was so widely read, it went on to shape the nascent literature of entire nations. Both the first novel written in Canada, Francis Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague in 1769; and the first novel written in America, The Power of Sympathy, by William Hill Brown in 1789, were written in the epistolary format.
Check out Joshua Chaplinsky’s Letters to the Purple Satin Killer here:
(WD uses affiliate links)
And while the novels of Richardson might not be familiar to modern readers, it wouldn’t be long before two mainstays of the current literary canon were produced in their wake: Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos in 1782, and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley in 1818. The former is probably most well-known for the 1985 stage play and subsequent film adaptation it inspired, the latter is one of the most enduring written works of all time.
Unfortunately, along with popularity comes fatigue, and inevitably, mockery. By the time Shelley’s novel was published, saturation gave rise to satire, and the epistolary format was caricatured in a number of biting burlesques—the Mel Brooks movies of their time. The once celebrated epistolary novel had fallen out of fashion. Even a book like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897 and considered one of the most famous novels ever written, made little money, and didn’t achieve widespread popularity until after the author’s death.
But that didn’t stop writers from continuing to utilize the format. A number of epistolary novels have broken through to a larger audience over the years and stood the test of time. These include The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis, The Collector, by John Fowles, Silence, by Shūsaku Endō, Carrie, by Stephen King, The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, The Perks of Being A Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky, Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding, We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver, The Sluts, by Dennis Cooper, and World War Z, by Max Brooks.
And there are plenty more where those came from. Despite being most closely associated with the 18th century, the number of epistolary novels published in the new millennium exceeds those published in any other era. Granted, there is a correlation between these numbers and the proliferation of technology/democratization of art, but still, the format persists.
So what is it about this format that continues to resonate with writers? Generally, letters are intended for a private audience, allowing for an almost voyeuristic sense of intimacy. They are often emotionally charged, written in direct language with a confessional air. There is an authenticity to them. The focused nature of the POV puts you directly in the character’s head, providing uncensored access, giving their every thought an immediacy. It is “writing to the moment” as Samuel Richardson called it.
Reading an epistolary novel feels like eavesdropping. Like being somewhere you shouldn’t. It can thrill you even as it manipulates your sympathies. The epistolary novel is a time capsule. A discovery. It is the found footage film of modern literature.
In the case of Letters to the Purple Satin Killer, the format allowed me to utilize the multiple POVs to paint a sympathetic portrait of an irredeemable monster. We see him through the eyes of people whose lives he’s destroyed, as well as people who love him unconditionally, who can’t bring themselves to accept what he’s done. Each perspective reveals a fragment of personality, a kernel of truth, weaving a fully formed character in the process, even though we never hear from that character directly. The letters written to this character tell us more than his actions ever could.
It’s like Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, the father of empiricism, said: Letters bring things more home, and represent them more to the life, than either Annals or Lives.
With a growing catalog of instructional writing videos available instantly, we have writing instruction on everything from improving your craft to getting published and finding an audience. New videos are added every month!
Sources
Gottlieb, Evan. “What is an Epistolary Novel?” Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms, Oregon State University, https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-epistolary-novelBrandtzæg, Siv Gøril. “The Epistolary Novel” Oxford Bibliographies, https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199846719/obo-9780199846719-0079.xmlHaas, Olivia. “Epistolary Fiction: A Novel Affair” Smithsonian National Postal Museum, https://postalmuseum.si.edu/research-articles/epistolary-fiction-development-of-the-epistolary-novel/number-of-epistolary-novelsSinger, Godrey Frank. “The Epistolary Novel: Its Origin, Development, Decline, and Residuary Influence” University of Pennsylvania Press (1933), https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv4s7hh6Quinn, Josephine Crawley. “Late Deliveries” Times literary Supplement no. 5800 (May 10, 2014) https://victorianweb.org/technology/letters/ancientgreece.htmlEpistolary Novel, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistolary_novelEpistolography, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistolography