Abstract
This book proposes that an epistolary approach characterises the neo-Victorian concern with processes of fragmentation, as endangered, disordered, and disorderly documents fashion and fabricate a pastiche of the Victorian past. There are both similarities and significant differences between nineteenth-century and contemporary fiction’s use of epistolary devices. The epistolary novel comprised purely of letters famously had its heyday in the eighteenth century, developing from earlier examples like Aphra Behn’s Love Letters between a Noble-man and His Sister (1684–7) and the anonymous Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1669) to later well-known epistolary novels like Frances Burney’s Evelina: Or The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance Into the World (1778), Samuel Richardson’s epic Clarissa: Or, The History of a Young Lady (1747–8), and Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1741), to name but three of many. Notably, in this last most renowned epistolary novel, letter-writing conventions metamorphose into diary writing; indeed, as Tom Keymer points out, Pamela ‘is never far from (and at one stage becomes) a soliloquising diary or journal’.2 An eighteenth-century epistolary novel also of particular significance to this study is Sophia Lee’s The Recess: A Tale of Other Times (1783), the success of which, April Alliston claims, was important in establishing both Gothic and historical fiction.3
A fine frenzy of epistolary inspiration
Wilkie Collins Armadale (1864–6)1
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Notes
Wilkie Collins, Armadale (London: Penguin, 2004 [1864–6]), p. 193.
Tom Keymer, Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 45.
April Alliston, ‘Introduction’, Sophia Lee’s The Recess: A Tale of Other Times, ed. by April Alliston (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2000 [1783]), p. ix.
Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 18.
See studies ranging from the early 1940 work by Frank Gees Black, The Epistolary Novel in the Late Eighteenth Century to Joe Bray’s The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness (London: Routledge, 2003).
See Ruth Perry’s Women, Letters and the Novel (1980), which examines the social context of letter writing in connection with the rise of the novel;
Mary A. Favret’s Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (1993) redefines the letter as a feminine genre;
April Alliston’s Virtue’s Faults: Correspondences in Eighteenth-Century British and French Women’s Fiction (1996) discusses more than a hundred epistolary novels written by women — mostly after Richardson.
Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook’s Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (1996), p. 174.
John Sutherland, Introduction to Wilkie Collins’s Armadale (London: Penguin, 2004 [1864–6]), p. vii.
The ‘Diary of Adam Grainger’ appears in Ellen Wood’s novel, Adam Grainger (1876) and diaries appear, or are cited in Charles Reade’s Hard Cash: A Matter of Fact Romance (1864), Foul Play (with Dion Boucicault) (1868), and A Simpleton: A Story of the Day (1873).
Kathleen Tillotson, ‘Introduction: The Lighter Reading of the Eighteen-Sixties’, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), p. xv.
Kelly A. Marsh, ‘The Neo-Sensation Novel: A Contemporary Genre in the Victorian Tradition’, Philological Quarterly 74 (1995), 99–123 (102).
Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady (London: Penguin, 1998 [1875]), p. 339.
See Catherine Delafield, Women’s Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009) for discussion of Collins’s female diarists from a feminist perspective.
Other examples of nineteenth-century multi-narrator diary novels include Dinah Craik’s A Life for a Life (1859),
Elizabeth Rundle Charles’s Chronicles of the Schönberg-Cotta Family (1864),
and Emily Sarah Holt’s Joyce Morrell’s Harvest: The Annals of Selwick Hall (1881).
Beth Palmer, ‘Are the Victorians Still With Us?: Victorian Sensation Fiction and its Legacies in the Twenty-First Century’, Victorian Studies, 52 (2009), 86–94 (91).
David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 94.
Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 48.
Margaret Atwood, ‘Author’s Afterword’, Alias Grace (London: Vintage, 2006 [1996]), p. 542.
Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian (London: Time Warner, 2005), p. 5.
Tim Lucas’s The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005) invents private diaries, professional journals, and wax-cylinder recordings made by Dr Seward for his obsessive study of Stoker’s character, Renfield.
A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (London: Vintage 1991 [1990]), p. 89. Hereafter referred to as Possession.
John Harwood, The Ghost Writer (London: Vintage, 2005) and The Seance (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008).
Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale (London: Orion, 2006), p. 315.
Andrea Barrett, The Voyage of the Narwhal (London: Flamingo, 2000), p. 112.
Deborah Martinson, In the Presence of Audience: Self and Diaries in Fiction (Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003), p. 1.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 200.
Melissa Pritchard, Selene of the Spirits (Princeton, NJ: The Ontario Review, 1998), p. 121, original emphasis.
There are also neo-Victorian novels where a diary is indicated, but the narrative fails to engage entailments of the form. For example, Rachel Hore’s The Glass Painter’s Daughter (London: Pocket Books, 2008) contains a Victorian diary begun in 1879 and discovered by what transpires to be the diarist’s descendant. The diary forms part of a dual time narrative, but, excepting a few representative entries, the diary is then converted into a third-person relating of ‘Laura’s story’. Similarly, Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage is a first-person account of bookbinding and pornography commissioned by the aristocracy. However, the novel belies its title by not conforming to the first-person day-to-day narration typical of a diary account and is ultimately explained as a retrospective account of the previous year’s events, written by bookbinder Dora in a rediscovered book that is ‘bound for nobody else but me, for nobody’s perusal, for no purchase’.
Belinda Starling, The Journal of Dora Damage (London: Bloomsbury 2007), p. 425.
Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘Editor’s Note’, Neo-Victorian Studies 2 (2008–9), i-vii (p. i).
Andrew Mangham, Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 5.
Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), p. xiii. Summerscale’s later book, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady (2012), retells the story of a scandalous divorce trial that took place in 1856. Isabella Robinson’s private confessional diary was produced in court as the main evidence for her prosecution.
L. E. Usher, Then Came October (York: Harbour Books, 2008), p. 229.
Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Natural History: The Retro-Victorian Novel’, in The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. by Elinor S. Shaffer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 253–8 (253).
See Daniel Candel Bormann, The Articulation of Science in the Neo-Victorian Novel: A Poetics (And Two Case Studies) (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002) for a study of Ever After and Possession.
Matthew Kneale has written a further neo-Victorian novel, Sweet Thames (1992), which, like Clare Clark’s The Great Stink (2005), explores the sewer systems of Victorian London. Both novels feature some form of journal or letters: a botany journal in Clark and anonymous letters in Kneale.
Suzanne Keen, Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 213.
Mariadele Boccardi, The Contemporary British Historical Novel: Representation, Nation, Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 99. Boccardi focuses on a number of neo-Victorian novels, including The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Siege of Krishnapur, The Chymical Wedding, Possession, Ever After, The Map of Love, and English Passengers.
Lindsay Clarke’s The Chymical Wedding: A Romance (1990) has no significantly intercalated documents.
Michael L. Ross, Race Riots: Comedy and Ethnicity in Modern British Fiction (Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), p. 249.
Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 68.
Jane Harris, The Observations (London: Faber & Faber, 2006), p. 18.
Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 86.
Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 3.
Matthew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), p. xxii.
See Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Hull, Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986).
Suzanne Bunkers, ‘What Do Women REALLY Mean? Thoughts on Women’s Diaries and Lives’, in The Intimate Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism, ed. by Diane P. Freedman, Olivia Frey, and Frances Murphy Zauhar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 207–21 (215–16).
Alasdair Gray, Poor Things (London: Bloomsbury 2002), p. 70.
See Jeanette King, The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Charles Palliser, ‘Author’s Afterword’, The Quincunx: The Inheritance of John Huffam (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 1208. This text will henceforth be referred to as The Quincunx.
Susana Onega, ‘Mirror Games and Hidden Narratives in The Quincunx’, in Theme Parks, Rainforests and Sprouting Wastelands: European Essays on Theory and Performance in Contemporary British Fiction, ed. by Richard Todd and Luisa Flora (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 151–63 (157).
Lorna Martens, The Diary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 295.
Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Tour Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006), pp. 259–422 (321).
Bernard Duyfhuizen, Narratives of Transmission (London: Associated University Presses, 1992), p. 96; pp. 76–7.
Andrew Hassam, Writing and Reality: A Study of Modern British Diary Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993), p. 18.
Trevor Field, Form and Function in the Diary Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), p. 21.
H. Porter Abbott, Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 19.
Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 129.
Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (London: Vintage, 2006 [1996]), p. 276.
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© 2013 Kym Brindle
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Brindle, K. (2013). Diary and Letter Strategies Past and Present. In: Epistolary Encounters in Neo-Victorian Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007162_2
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