Samuel Richardson and the Art of Letter-Writing

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Samuel Richardson was not only a prolific correspondent with friends and admirers, but his hugely influential novels were written in epistolary style. This study examines at Samuel Richardson's letters and their relationship with his novels to explore the interconnection between fiction and correspondence in eighteenth-century literature.

This fascinating study examines Samuel Richardson's letters as important works of authorial self-fashioning. It analyses the development of his epistolary style; the links between his own letter-writing practice and that of his fictional protagonists; how his correspondence is highly conscious of the spectrum of publicity; and how he constructed his letter collections to form an epistolary archive for posterity. Looking backwards to earlier epistolary traditions, and forwards, to the emergence of the lives-in-letters mode of biography, the book places Richardson's correspondence in a historical continuum. It explores how the eighteenth century witnesses a transition, from a period in which an author would rarely preserve personal papers to a society in which the personal lives of writers become privileged as markers of authenticity in the expanded print market. It argues that Richardson's letters are shaped by this shifting relationship between correspondence and publicity in the mid-eighteenth century.

Louise Curran is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Oxford. She is co-editor (with George Justice and Devoney Looser) of Correspondence Primarily on Pamela and Clarissa (1732¿1749), a forthcoming volume in The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson. As well as articles on Richardson's correspondence, she has written on Pope's Rape of the Lock and Milton's reception in eighteenth-century verse miscellanies.