Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790-1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions

Whatever happened to the epistolary novel? Why was it that by 1825 the principal narrative form of 18th-century fiction had been replaced by the third-person and often historicised models which have predominated ever since? This original and wide-ranging study charts the suppression of epistolary fiction, exploring the attempted radicalization of the genre by Wollstonecraft and other feminists in the 1790s, its rejection and parody by Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, the increasingly discredited role played by letters in the historical novels of Jane Porter and Walter Scott, and their troubling, ghostly presence in the Gothic narratives of James Hogg and Charles Maturin. The shift in narrative method is seen as a response to anxieties about the French Revolution, with the epistolary, feminized, and sentimental plot replaced by a more authoritarian third-person mode as part of a wider redrawing of the relation between the individual and the social consensus.