The Epistolary Form

A narrative told through an exchange of documents, most often letters, but also diary entries, telegrams and, in contemporary examples, emails and text messages. The form gives a story multiple first person voices without a narrator standing outside them, and lets a reader see the gap between what a character tells one correspondent and what the events actually are. Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa established the epistolary novel as a major eighteenth century form, and it has remained in use since, from Bram Stoker's Dracula, told through letters, diaries and news clippings, to Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Long before the epistolary novel, real letter collections such as Cicero's and Seneca's were already read as literature in their own right, a nonfiction root the form has never fully separated from.