Private language made public: The language of letters as literature

Abstract

This paper discusses the genre of the epistolary novel as an experiment in narrative style in the seventeenth century. It is considered in terms of the appropriation of the subjective language characteristics of the intimate letter as a vehicle for narrative fiction, intended to be accessible to a public, not a private audience. I question the popular analogy of the private letter and the face-to-face communicative situation in pragmatic or rhetorical terms; and argue that its deictic organisation makes the letter frame a candidate for a realist representation of the private stories of characters in fiction. I then consider the attempted fusion of epistolary language with narrative in literature by comparing authentic love-letters (Dorothy Osborne's love-letters to William Temple) and examples of the early epistolary novel (Roger L'Estrange's translation of the anonymous Portuguese Letters, and Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister.