This title was first published in 2003. The author explores and describes the nature of what he terms "epistolary spaces", phenomena that came into being as a result of the foundation during the 1650s of a Post Office available to the general public. He focuses on the history of letter-writing by English men and women, and in so doing he shows how the imaginations of letter writers were affected by the increasingly cheaper, faster and more efficient postal services that were developed throughout the time period covered. The book makes a detailed study of five "real" correspondences, reading the letters in terms of their social and political interest and addressing such concerns as class, gender, collections of model letters and the importance of London to English epistolary spaces. How portrays epistolary spaces variously as arenas in which to explore the new urban culture of London, in the love letters of Dorothy Osborne (1652-4); courtly enclaves, in the diplomatic letters of the dramatist Sir George Etherege (1685-9); and aristocratic redoubts, in the correspondence between the Countesses of Hertford and Pomfret (1739-41). Finally, How examines the letters that constitute Richardson's novel "Clarissa", showing how the artistic achievement of Richardson's greatest novel was aided by almost a century of just such imaginations of epistolary spaces as are to be found in the letters of Clarissa Harlowe, Anna Howe and Robert Lovelace.

Writing Home is the critically annotated correspondence of Emma Alderson, an 1840s immigrant from England to Ohio, mingling details of daily life with observations on slavery, American customs, religious communities, the impending war with Mexico, and more. Ending with Alderson's death in 1847, the letters formed the basis for Mary Howitt's popular children's book Our Cousins in Ohio (1849).

"While most of the letter writers are unknown, four achieved prominence - the author Charlotte Lennox, the Reverend Thomas Winstanley, the navigator Charles Clerke, and the bluestocking Susannah Dobson. This book presents new perspectives on Lennox's and Winstanley's domestic lives, Clerke's ambiguous encounters with indigenous peoples, and Dobson's mysterious sexuality." "This book will appeal to eighteenth-century scholars as well as to scholars in women's and cultural studies. It will also be of interest to postcolonial, queer, and other literary theorists."--BOOK JACKET.

This volume illustrates the significance of epistolarity as a literary phenomenon intricately interwoven with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural developments. Rejecting the common categorization of letters as primarily private documents, this collection of essays demonstrates the genre's persistent public engagements with changing cultural dynamics of the revolutionary, early republican, and antebellum eras. Sections of the collection treat letters' implication in transatlanticism, authorship, and reform movements as well as the politics and practices of editing letters. The wide range of authors considered include Mercy Otis Warren, Charles Brockden Brown, members of the Emerson and Peabody families, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Stoddard, Catherine Brown, John Brown, and Harriet Jacobs. The volume is particularly relevant for researchers in U.S. literature and history, as well as women's writing and periodical studies. This dynamic collection offers scholars an exemplary template of new approaches for exploring an understudied yet critically important literary genre.

Marie Jeanne Riccoboni’s Epistolary Feminism: Fact, Fiction, and Voice argues that Riccoboni is among the most significant women writers of the French Enlightenment due to her "epistolary feminism". Locating its source in her first novel Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd (1757), between fact and fiction, public and private, Marijn S. Kaplan provides new evidence supporting both the novel’s autobiography theory and de Maillebois hypothesis. Kaplan then traces how Riccoboni progressively develops a proto-feminist poetics of voice in her epistolary fiction, empowering women to resist patriarchal efforts to silence and appropriate them, which culminates in her final novel Lettres de Milord Rivers (1777). In nineteen relatively unknown letters (included, with translations) written over three decades to her publisher Humblot, several editors, Diderot, Laclos, Philip Thicknesse etc., Riccoboni is shown similarly to defend her oeuvre, her reputation, and her authority as a woman (writer), refusing to be manipulated and silenced by men.

The first book to address the role of correspondence in the study of religion, Debating the Faith: Religion and Letter Writing in Great Britain, 1550-1800 shows how letters shaped religious debate in early-modern and Enlightenment Britain, and discusses the materiality of the letters as well as questions of form and genre. Particular attention is paid to the contexts in which letters were composed, sent, read, distributed, and then destroyed, copied or printed, in periods of religious tolerance or persecution. The opening section, ‘Protestant identities’, examines the importance of letters in the shaping of British protestantism from the underground correspondence of Protestant martyrs in the reign of Mary I to dissident letters after the Act of Toleration. ‘Representations of British Catholicism’, explores the way English, Irish and Scottish Catholics, whether in exile or at home, defined their faith, established epistolary networks, and addressed political and religious allegiances in the face of adversity. The last part, ‘Religion, science and philosophy’, focuses on the religious content of correspondence between natural scientists and philosophers.​