research paper on epistolary novels

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The Epistolary Novel in the Eighteenth Century The Epistolary French Novel between History and Literature

Thanks to progress in learning and in postal organization, the letter becomes an important medium for communicating information and can be viewed as a precursor to the modern gazette. So the evolution of the epistolary form facilitates news circulation concerning politics, literature, family and society: it's the main way used by aristocracy and bourgeoisie to find news (Grassi, 1994 : 302). So the readers are impatient to receive a letter to enliven an ordinary life. The value of a letter lies in several aspects considering that the "art" of letter writing under the Ancien Régime in France clearly has an ethic as well as an aesthetic importance, a politic as well as a poetic component. So letters published as "art" under Classicism are always transformed into illustrations of the "art" of writing letters where the writing subject is positioned as a loyal (male) servant of an aristocratic order revolving around an absolute king 1. However, epistolary novel gives arise in the second half of the eighteenth century. The beginning of the Eighteenth is dominated by memoirs in which the protagonists offer their experience of life and love. The principle quality, attributed to a letter, is its capacity to transmit feelings immediately: in fact, a letter avoids temporal distance between lived experience and its written expression. In this way, the absence of a narrator guarantees the authenticity of narration because nobody can talk or think in place of characters (Burel, 2012: 506) 2. 1. "This writer serves the monarch through public speech acts that constitute a predictable and universally imitable model of courtesy. The counter current to this dominant Classical model, which coexists with it from the outset, is epistolary 'art' interpreted as inimitable but inspiring emulation, because it is understood to emanate from differing, private literary spaces that articulate the particularities of historical contingency. The latter concept of epistolary art generates discourses of cultural difference, which will assume a renewed ascendancy in the eighteenth century" (Altman, 1986: 62). 2. P. V. Conroy analyses the principal elements concerning the French epistolary genre (epistolary choice, public and authenticity) in this way: "By adopting the epistolary format, the novel took upon itself that particular way of rendering the outside world that the letter had already conditioned the reading public to accept as normal. To the extent that fictitious novel followed the same conventions and satisfied the same expectations as did American Research Journal of English and Literature Abstract: The eighteenth century is considered as the golden age of epistolary art. If we analyse the historical and social value of letters, we notice that epistolary exchange soon becomes one of the principal ways of communication and of providing information. One of the most important qualities of the epistolary novel is its ability to effectively convey emotion. The epistolary novel removes the temporal distance between personal history and its written form. The most famous writers of the time (such as Montesquieu) and libertine writers (Laclos and Sade in particular) employed the epistolary novel in different ways. So eighteenth-century literature is characterised by the successful epistolary novel. Since the Modern Age letter has held great historical and social importance due to the power of letter to act as a vehicle for information. This emerges as one of the main reasons for the rise in popularity of the epistolary novel.

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The agreement between letter writers to stay in touch, irrespective of the time and space that will keep them apart, presumably calls for an interpersonal contract that has both a ritual and symbolic meaning. The epistolary agreement is an interpersonal contract between potential correspondents who have consented to continue their contact in an indirect manner, through letter writing. The paper argues that the promise to correspond was, and still is, a kind of epistolary, social contract that substantiates the imaginary dialogue over distance. The eighteenth-century epistolary narratives under discussion show that, with their letters, epistolers kept a promise not only to write back but also to gratify recipients' curiosity of the world at large. As it was considered rhetorically closer to the art and practice of oral conversation, letter writing was also viewed as proof of friendship.

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24 The Rise and Decline of the Epistolary Novel, 1770–1832

Ros Ballaster is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the Faculty of English, Oxford University at Mansfield College. Her research interests are in oriental fiction, women’s writing, drama and performance. She is author of two monographs: Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction 1684–1740 (1992) and Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662–1785 (2005) and a further is forthcoming entitled Being There: Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England.

Published: 05 September 2013
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This essay charts the fortunes of a specific genre, the epistolary novel, which delivers plot and character exclusively through letters whether from a single correspondent, a couple, or many. In the shadow of Richardson’s dominance, there are successive attempts to innovate and experiment both of personality (presenting new kinds of voice and main protagonist) and geography (sending letter-writers to parts of the globe ‘new’ to English readers). It opens with the healthy flourishing of letter fiction from 1769 to 1780 and the twin traditions of domestic (Elizabeth Griffith, Frances Burney) and picaresque (Tobias Smollett). The epistolary mode is next experimented with in the 1790s to describe and define both revolutionary turmoil and colonial experience by authors such as Charlotte Smith, Eliza Fenwick, Phoebe Gibbes, and Charlotte Lennox. The early decades of the eighteenth century see the troubled departure from and live burial of epistolary exchange in the novels of Edgeworth, Owenson, and Scott.

Mr Villars to Lady Howard March 18. Dear Madam, This letter will be delivered to you by my child,—the child of my adoption, —my affection! Unblest with one natural friend, she merits a thousand. I send her to you, innocent as an angel, and artless as purity itself: and I send you with her the heart of your friend, the only hope he has on earth, the subject of his tenderest thoughts, and the object of his latest cares. She is one, Madam, for whom alone I have lately wished to live; and she is one whom to serve I would with transport die! Restore her but to me all innocence as you receive her, and the fondest hope of my heart will be amply gratified! A. Villars 1

In 1778 the novel in letters was, like the eponymous heroine of Burney’s fiction, a thriving, indeed blooming, product circulating in the reading world with great success and especially prized for its much-vaunted unselfconsciousness. However, the story often told in the epistolary novel was a familiar one by this point, a story of corruption in and by the world resulting in disgrace and death. Villars’s missive reminds us that letters have destinations or destinies and at this point Evelina’s destiny seems ‘written’ for the reader; Burney, of course, turns that destiny in a different direction, rewarding her heroine with a wealthy, aristocratic, and admiring husband, and a restored legitimacy in a reunion with the father who has been duped into raising a suppositious child in her stead. Villars’s language characterizes Evelina not only as ‘letter’ (‘I send her to you’) but also as agent of delivery (‘This letter will be delivered to you by my child’). The conscious pun on ‘delivery’ and ‘child’ makes us aware of the conceit that the letter is an artificial substitute for the person, sent when correspondents cannot be together in person, just as Villars and Evelina have an ‘artificial’ connection not of blood kinship. So too, the epistolary novel created powerful feelings in its readers of affection and kinship with its invented protagonists.

However, by the early nineteenth century, the epistolary novel was in bad shape. The exquisite pleasures of participating in a lingering death afforded by Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748–9) and rehearsed in subsequent letter novels were substituted by the frustrations of pursuing the ghostly presence of letters curtailed, silenced, intercepted, unread, or simply abandoned in midstream. Thus the second volume of Scott’s Redgauntlet (1824) opens with the interruption of the exchange of letters between two young male friends by an editor; he pronounces that

the advantage of laying before the reader, in the words of the actors themselves, the adventures which we must otherwise have narrated in our own, has given great popularity to the publication of epistolary correspondence, as practised by various great authors, and by ourselves in the preceding volume. Nevertheless, a genuine correspondence of this kind, (and Heaven forbid it should be in any respect sophisticated by interpolations of our own!) can seldom be found to contain all in which it is necessary to instruct the reader for his full comprehension of the story. Also it must often happen that various prolixities and redundancies occur in the course of an interchange of letters, which would only hang as a dead weight on the progress of the narrative. To avoid this dilemma, some biographers have used the letters of the personages concerned, or liberal extracts from them, to describe particular incidents, or express the sentiments which they entertained; while they connect them occasionally with such portions of narrative, as may serve to carry on the thread of the story. 2

Scott’s case—that the epistolary novel’s unfolding of character was at odds with the public taste for narrative incident—has proved compelling for historians of the novel. As Clare Brant reminds us, deciphering ‘character’ is a preoccupation of the novel in letters in both a physical and hermeneutic sense (working out handwriting as well as working out the creditworthiness of the one who writes): letters are ‘forms of writing which in the eighteenth century were understood to be never far from character’. 3 Nevertheless, the interest in character at the expense of plot was on the wane, at least with publishers who claimed to be serving the tastes of their readers. Elizabeth Lefanu was apologetic in the preface to her India Voyage of 1804 for the epistolary style as ‘more favourable to the development of character than the narrative’. 4 ‘[O]‌ne suspects’, writes Peter Garside, ‘that the mechanics of the epistolary form had become an impediment to a readership eager for the thrills and escapades available in newer direct narrative modes, notably the Gothic novel. In these circumstances, publishers are likely to have discouraged unmediated epistolary structures.’ He gives as an example the ‘Advertisement’ to The Irishwoman in London (1810), in which the author, Ann Mary Hamilton, complained that the publisher, J. F. Hughes, had altered the text ‘from Letters to Chapters’, ‘conceiving it not so saleable’. 5

It is incontrovertible from the publishing evidence that the epistolary mode did undergo a new surge in the general output of novels in the 1770s and a decline in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Godfrey Frank Singer estimates from reviews and notices of fictional works published between 1741 and 1800 that one-fifth of the 1,341 titles he identifies are epistolary. Although half of the sentimental novels that appeared in 1785 are, by his calculation, epistolary, ‘after 1786 the epistolary mode suddenly goes out of fashion, and is used decreasingly as the years go on’. 6 As Garside notes, the comprehensive bibliography published in The English Novel 1770–1829 (2000) added only a small number of titles to Frank Gees Black’s ‘Chronological List of Epistolary Fiction’. 7 The story of the rise and decline of the epistolary novel begins to look less like an organic passage from innocence to experience and more like a conspiracy. The epistolary novel did not fall; it was pushed.

Histories of genres tend to reach for generic explanations for the rise and decline of genres. Three persuasive critical works have paid full and careful attention to the generic habits of the epistolary mode but have drawn their conclusions about its decline from the 1790s onwards from non-literary or non-generic evidence. Thomas O. Beebee asserts that epistolary fiction is a ‘function rather than a thing’, a mode of writing and reading in which the reader adopts the place of the fictional addressee. For Beebee, the rise of epistolary fiction in the early modern period is the result of its connection to non-literary forms such as the letter-writing manual and the letter itself, which enables it to appear more capable of connecting with the real than previously dominant fictional modes such as epic and romance. The decline of epistolary fiction is in turn explained as a function of the emergence of a distinct category of the ‘literary’ in the early nineteenth century: ‘As Literature constitutes itself more and more as a unique discursive practice with language and representation as its objects, the letter-form which had previously tied fiction to the realm of ethics, religion, and information begins to burden rather than empower.’ 8 Nicola Watson sees the decline of the epistolary novel as rather the outcome of a long struggle to respond to a single example of the genre, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie; ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761). This for Watson is a political and ideological contest over the meaning of revolution in the last decade of the eighteenth century; she identifies a series of different strategies and structures on the part of both pro- and anti-Jacobins evolved to contain the potentially revolutionary force of the Héloïse plot—strategies which see letters ‘insistently intercepted, scrutinized, and redirected in censored form’. 9 Mary Favret also explores the ideological anxieties in England over revolution. She observes that the decline of epistolary fiction in the 1790s coincides with the rise of the Post Office (the mail coach comes under its control in 1798) and increasing state regulation of correspondence amid rising fears of ‘secret’ correspondence between revolutionary insurgents. The ‘fiction’ of the feminine and private nature of the letter is increasingly revealed as a sophisticated form of drapery to conceal or write over the political potentials of the letter and the containment of its incendiary potential through publication, the making public of conspiracy and correspondence. 10

Letters are a common feature in most novels of the eighteenth century and continue to feature in prose fiction up to the present day; our interest in this essay is in novels which deliver both plot and character wholly through letters whether from a single correspondent, a couple, or many. My focus throughout is on the changing fortunes of ‘character’ in relation to narrative. Just as letter fictions depict characters whose discourse is shaped by the correspondent to whom they write, I will argue that the novel in letters is highly responsive to its predecessors in the mode: that individual novels and authors are ‘writing back’ or ‘co-responding’ to powerful generic predecessors. Difficulties and tensions between character and plot/narrative recur throughout the epistolary novel’s not-so-long history; it is not a conflict in which ‘plot’ eventually triumphs but rather one in which alternative techniques for weaving the representation of character into the representation of event prove more effective and resilient, indeed come to define themselves consciously by negating the epistolary vehicle. 11 This is then a story about how a particular generic experiment failed to survive, a story of a life not-lived, but a life of considerable if invisible influence. We will look at successive attempts to ‘redirect’ the form. These are attempts both of personality (presenting new kinds of voice and main protagonist) and geography (sending letter-writers to parts of the globe ‘new’ to English readers). We will look in turn at examples of novels in letters from 1769 to 1780, the 1790s, and the first two decades of the eighteenth century.

Healthy Signs: 1769–1780

Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–8) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4) raised the game of the epistolary novel considerably in the mid-eighteenth century. The letter in fiction had previously served as a device for the delivery of a narrative or series of narratives to one or more correspondents but often with one or very few correspondents. Richardson’s novels produce a community of mutual readers and writers variously privy to different parts of the correspondence circulating among them. The network novel instigated by Richardson remains a continuing influence in the 1770s but the epistolary novel received new impetus from two significant publications translated swiftly into English from France and Germany. Jean-Jacques Rousseau revived and exploited the success of two earlier letter fictions in the voice of a passionate nun: the 1669 Lettres portugaises (translated as Five Love-Letters of a Nun into English by Sir Roger L’Estrange) of Mariana Alcoforado to a cavalier-lover, and the translation from Latin into French in 1713 of the letters of the twelfth-century Héloïse d’Argenteuil to her tutor and lover Peter Abelard following their separation and his castration by her vengeful family. The first English translator’s choice of the title Eloisa: or a Series of Original Letters Collected and Published by J. J. Rousseau (4 vols., 1761) reminded readers of Alexander Pope’s still-popular 1717 poem ‘Eloisa to Abelard’. William Kenrick’s slightly modified translation of Rousseau’s novel was not published under the French title of Julie until an Edinburgh edition of 1773. Rousseau concentrates on the presentation and analysis of intense feeling and its suppression as Julie struggles to overcome her first passion for Saint-Preux in an honourable and successful marriage to her father’s choice, Baron Wolmar. Nonetheless, on her deathbed as a result of a cold caught saving one of her children from drowning, Julie confesses her undimmed love for Saint-Preux. The Richardsonian network novel is now tied to the amatory intensity of the ‘Portuguese’ style. Rousseau’s novel was one of the greatest publishing successes of the eighteenth century, its fifteenth French edition appearing in 1812.

By contrast Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), translated as The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1779, transferred the intense and repetitive expression of unfulfilled desire associated with the voice of the abandoned female anchorite, to a young and sentimental male. In the course of eighty letters, Werther describes to his friend, Wilhelm, his encounter with and passion for the country girl, Lotte, already betrothed to the worthy Albert, in the remote and lovely countryside of the fictional area of Waldheim. The novel concludes with the hero’s suicide in despair at his unrequited love. Robyn Shiffman persuasively argues that Goethe’s short novel reverses and stalls the circulatory optimism of the Richardsonian novel and its imitators, revealing that the circulation and exchange of the epistolary mode has become stagnant and illusory. 12 The energy associated with the voice of active desire is the special quality of the epistolary fictions in the 1770s and 1780s. This energy may be located in the transformative power of sentimental connections often but not always amatory.

The optimism about the power of the circulating letter to connect and reform individuals is demonstrated in two very different epistolary novels, Elizabeth Griffith’s The Delicate Distress (1769) and Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771). The former locates that circulating virtue in the country estate and the tested loyalty of a virtuous wife, the latter in the picaresque encounters of a travelling family with a variety of characters who, like themselves, are tested to discover whether eccentricity cloaks or, indeed, indicates virtue. As Griffith’s novel was published with another by her husband, Richard ( The Gordian Knot ), under the title Two Novels in Letters. By the Authors of Henry and Frances , capitalizing on the success of the publication of the first four volumes of their courtship and marriage letters, A Series of Genuine Letters Between Henry and Frances , readers were already accustomed to see the couple as models of epistolary success. In the Genuine Letters they had already extrapolated the idea of different and complementary epistolary styles male and female as productive of marital balance. 13

The plot of The Delicate Distress unfolds through the exchange of letters between groups of correspondents who have different access to information. Responsibility for delivering the main threads of the narrative shifts, not always easily, between the epistolary circle of the heroine, the recently married Emily Woodville (whose major correspondent is her sister, Lady Straffon), and that of her husband (whose major correspondent is Lord Seymour). Seymour is entangled in a melodramatic love affair with an illegitimate French girl, Charlotte Beaumont. Meanwhile, Emily comes to suspect her husband of a continuing attachment to his first love, the exotic Isabella, Marchioness de St. Aumont, ‘a true Calypso’. 14 To save her heroine from expressing so indelicate a suspicion, Griffith strategically transfers the unfolding of plot to the letters of Lord Woodville himself, not returning it to Emily until after the crisis is averted and the husband returns to his long-suffering wife. Seymour, however, cannot be united with Charlotte who, despite her continuing passion, like Éloïse and Mariana, embraces the role of nun, in this case because her lover has killed her brother in a duel. The story of the good wife’s patient suffering when her husband is attracted to an exotic foreign or foreign-educated mistress revives in later sentimental epistolary novels (see, for example, the subsequent discussion of Leonora ). The letter enables the reader to see the depth of emotion and attachment, indeed passion, in the English wife who is a model of decorum and serene maternity in public.

Smollett also counterpoints correspondent pairs but for comic effect. In the course of a journey from Wales to the Scottish Highlands via Bath and London, letters from the older spinster vulnerable to the excitements of a Methodist religiosity and desperate to secure a suitor at any price, Tabitha Bramble, are contrasted with those of her lovely niece, Lydia Melford, pursued by a suitor, Wilson, from whom she has been separated by her hot-headed Oxford student brother, Jery, and her eccentric, hypochondriac uncle, Matthew Bramble; the correspondence of the uncle and nephew reveals not contrasts but similarities, exposing both as flawed men of sensibility. The novel concludes with the disclosures of true gentility behind apparent lowness and reformed virtue from apparent vice familiar from the comic dramas of intrigue of the eighteenth-century stage and the comic novels of Henry Fielding. Humphry Clinker proves to be the illegitimate offspring of Matthew Bramble and is united with his somewhat fickle sweetheart, Tabitha’s servant, Winifred Jenkins. Lydia is united with Wilson, revealed to be the disguised and wealthy George Dennison. Tabitha marries her quixotic-suitor, Obadiah Lismahago, a retired Scottish soldier. Character is not, however, ‘proved’ in this novel, as it is in The Delicate Distress , through disclosure of hidden feelings and sentimental energies in the letter. It is, rather, performed through orthographic renderings of particular styles: the hilarious errors of spelling and lexis in the letters of Tabitha and Win, the sensitivity and familial loyalty betrayed in small slips of the pen by Jery and Matthew. Where The Delicate Distress weaves its plot through the exchange of letters by a network of correspondents, each letter-writer in Humphry Clinker has their own silent addressee: Matthew to his doctor, Dick Lewis; Jery to his fellow student and friend, Watkin Philips; Tabitha to Mrs. Gwyllim the housekeeper at Brambleton-hall; Liddy to her friend, Laetitia Willis, of Gloucester; Win to her fellow servant, Mary Jones, at Brambleton-hall. Character passes through these silent conduits and the filaments of connection and affection of the travelling group are made apparent to the readers of the novel while they remain invisible to the members of the party or those addressees.

In these two examples we see the expression of two powerful trajectories for the epistolary novel, picaresque ( Humphry Clinker ) and domestic ( Delicate Distress ). The former revived some of the potentials and pleasures of the ‘spy’ letter sequence of the eighteenth century, providing descriptive accounts of spaces and places encountered in travels, the re-narration of contemporary or recent political and national scandals, satirical comment on social and political abuses. Both, however, set in train the expectation that the epistolary novel represented the ‘familiar’ world in the sense of the relations between members of a ‘family’, both servants and masters. And both works imply that the careful balance of power between those members—not always requiring submission to obvious hierarchy but rather mutual respect and interdependence—could provide a model for other power relations, especially those between neighbouring states or governing state and its colonies.

Two further epistolary novels of this earlier period can serve to indicate the robustness of the mode in the 1770s. Henry Mackenzie’s last novel, Julia de Roubigné. A Tale. In a Series of Letters (1777), is described on its title page as a work by the already celebrated ‘author of The Man of Feeling and the Man of the World’, whereas Frances Burney’s Evelina or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778) was a publishing sensation which in a few months identified its authoress as, like its heroine, an untried figure of considerable attraction in a crowded market. Rather than providing a network of correspondents, these novels make the major correspondent an innocent and intelligent woman assiduously courted by more than one man but romantically committed to a single preferred suitor; in each case, the addressee/confidante is removed from the action of the text and largely incapable of influencing the unfolding of the plot. Julia, a French girl, obliged to accompany her parents into country retirement following the collapse of her father’s fortune through a lawsuit, nurtures an undeclared passion for her childhood friend, Savillon, who has gone to Martinique to make his fortune under the care of a plantation-owning uncle. However, when a generous Spanish-educated neighbour, Montaubon, relieves her father of debts likely to result in imprisonment following the death of her mother, Julia (believing reports of Savillon’s planned marriage to a plantation heiress) accepts Montaubon’s marriage proposal. Julia proves a model wife but Savillon returns, reveals his own long-standing passion through her friend and major correspondent, Maria, and requests an interview. Montaubon, through the covert investigations of his servant, intercepts Julia’s letters and, believing her unfaithful, poisons her shortly after the interview only to discover her innocence on her deathbed. He kills himself with laudanum.

Evelina’s fate is, quite explicitly, a more ‘English’ one despite her unfortunate connections through a vulgar grandmother, Madame Duval, with the French world of violent passions never perfectly suppressed and sudden death rehearsed in Julia de Roubigné and most familiar from Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse . Evelina leaves the guardianship of the country clergyman, Villars, to whom her dead mother has entrusted her, to visit his friend Lady Howard who, in turn, obtains permission for her daughter’s family, the Mirvans, to conduct Evelina to London. Here, Evelina encounters the polite and upright Lord Orville to whom she is powerfully attracted, the fascinating and persistent Sir Clement Willoughby who pursues her relentlessly, and her vulgar relations, Madame Duval and the Branghton family. Evelina goes first to the country, then finds herself subject to a series of mortifications in London in the company of her grandmother but here she also befriends a suicidal young poet Macartney. Our heroine falls ill when she receives an insulting letter from Orville (in fact a forgery by Sir Clement) and returns to Villars and Berry Hill to recuperate. Macartney becomes the subject of Lord Orville’s jealousy when they all meet again at the resort of Clifton Heights to which Evelina has travelled with her bold and outgoing neighbour, Lady Selwyn. Evelina proves her innocence and love to Orville, however, and he brings about a reconciliation with her estranged father, Lord Belmont, heretofore deceived by a wetnurse into raising a suppositious child, Polly Green, in Evelina’s place. Evelina Anville and her lover, Orville, can now be happily united.

Julia and Evelina are preoccupied less with judging others than the difficulties of managing the ways in which their characters are understood and circulate in the societies they enter and inhabit. The fact that their stories are rendered through their own letters not only ensures that the readers are left in no doubt as to their innocence but it also reveals in Julia’s case the depth and authenticity of her sensibility and in Evelina’s the quickness and charm of her wit. However, we can also see each as developing the two trajectories we have identified in their predecessors: in Evelina , the picaresque satire of Humphry Clinker , and in Julia , the domestic sentiment of The Delicate Distress . Differences of style indicate the difference of emphasis here. ‘In truth,’ confesses Julia in her tenth letter, ‘my story is the story of sentiment.’ 15

Revolutionary Ills and Imperial Revivals: the 1790s

The epistolary novel became a vehicle for response to the extraordinary transformations of the 1790s. The letter serves as a means of bridging distance, of bringing to life for a correspondent ‘at home’ the experiences and worlds encountered by a familiar writer ‘away’ or ‘abroad’. It is perhaps surprising that so many significant examples of the mode until this point had confined themselves to a domestic circle or to action that takes place in a single and familiar European state: Great Britain, France, Switzerland, Germany. In the 1790s epistolary fiction brings domestic lives into contact with state political unrest and its correspondents travel further afield to report on spaces profoundly ‘foreign’ but also intensely interesting to English readers.

We can also identify fresh cynicism about the agency of the letter as a vehicle of (purity of) intent, fuelled by the success of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses in 1782. Laclos’s sensational work depicted a corrupt French aristocracy driven by motives of private pleasure, revenge, and competition to seduce the innocent. Whereas Richardson had countered Lovelace’s libertine confidences to his friend Belford with those of the virtuous and intelligent Clarissa to hers, Anna Howe, Laclos’s revolution was to give libertine voices the whip hand throughout his novel. The traditional gap in the network novel between what the reader knows and what the central protagonist knows here narrows so that the reader finds him- or herself in uncomfortable conspiracy with—and often indeed admiring—the villains of the piece. Laclos can be seen as, like Rousseau, an apologist anticipating revolutionary forces designed to restore ‘natural’ desire to a rightful authority undermined by a ‘civilization’ that has become corrupt and self-serving.

By the 1790s, unfolding violence in France led English and French writers alike to view with concern the extent of the revolutionary ‘purges’ which appeared to be overturning authority itself. The story of love in the letter turns to the issue of revolution and its unpredictable outcomes. Charlotte Smith’s Desmond (1792), written and published before the onset of the Terror in France, opens with its eponymous hero engaged in an impassioned defence of the French Revolution and Enlightenment principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, in correspondence with his older friend and mentor Erasmus Bethel. Lionel Desmond falls in love with the married Geraldine Verney, and proves himself a hero when he saves her and her children from the dangers to which they are exposed when her dissolute husband summons her to join him in an unsettled French landscape populated by looters and robbers armed by southern French aristocrats. The death of Geraldine’s husband makes possible their union but not before we discover that Desmond has had an affair and fathered an illegitimate child with the Frenchwoman who bears an uncanny resemblance to Geraldine, Josephine de Boisbelle, sister to his friend Montfleuri. Desmond exhibits the distinctive tension that marks the fiction of Godwin and Wollstonecraft, the authors’ Jacobin fellows. The attempt to produce social criticism, to promote meritocratic principles, and to attack a decadent aristocratic culture sits uneasily with more traditional modes of narrative in which a misjudged hero reveals his true worth through honourable action. For all Desmond’s dislike of inherited wealth and institutional power, he is very much in the mould of the romance hero. Indeed, the lively sister of Desmond’s friend, Fanny Waverley, quips in a reference to her attraction to Desmond that ‘there is but one in the world whom I should select as the hero of my romance, if I were in haste to make one’. 16 The instability of ‘character’ in Desmond contributes to the heated debate over whether the French Revolution was a manifestation of ‘true’ (for the Jacobins) or ‘false’ (for the anti-Jacobins) sympathy and sublimity, but it also found appropriate form in the letter novel where interpretive command is ceded to the reader or produced through the reading of letters which compete for interpretive authority among a network of correspondents.

By the time Eliza Fenwick published her ‘revolutionary’ work, Secresy , or, the Ruin on the Rock in 1795, France had undergone a year of terror (June 1793–July 1794) and Jacobin sympathizers such as Fenwick had been forced to reassess their enthusiasm for the revolution. Secrecy may locate its action in England but it consistently alludes to French precedents and contexts. The evil patriarch who deprives his lovely niece of company and raises her alongside his adopted (later discovered to be his natural) son, Clement Montgomery, on the model of differentiated education of girls and boys found in Rousseau’s Émile (1762), shares a surname with the libertine anti-hero of Laclos’s work, Valmont. Sibella, the niece, in her unswerving passion for a single man, Clement, is not only another version of Rousseau’s Julie but the occasion for a feminist critique by her author of Rousseau’s educational plans for Sophie in Émile ; separation from society results in the indulgence of imagination and an uncontrollable will (she falls pregnant as a result of her infatuation for the undeserving Clement). Fenwick uses the trappings of the Gothic—the mysterious monk frequenting Valmont’s castle, the ‘ruin’ constructed by Valmont as a tomb which his weak-willed wife fantasizes will be the place of her live burial—to criticize aristocratic hypocrisy, self-interest, and privilege. The main correspondent is Caroline Ashburn and yet, as other critics note, 17 she proves impotent, unable—despite her warm sympathies—to improve the dismal lot of others in the face of implacable desires and resistant social and familial structures she encounters.

A third example of novels written in the wake of revolution alerts us to a different response, pointing to the sense of optimism, liberation, and republican possibility following the American Revolution among enfranchised American writers. Nonetheless we witness a similarly tragic outcome as a result of a discrepancy between the revolutionary ideal and the post-revolutionary reality. Hannah Foster’s 1797 novel, The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton; A Novel; Founded on Fact , was derived from a sensational newspaper story about the life and death in 1788 in Boston, Massachusetts, of Elizabeth Whitman. A short fiction of seventy-four letters, two-thirds of them delivered by female correspondents with Eliza Wharton the lead correspondent, Hannah Foster’s novel depicts a heroine with high ideals of marriage who plays with the sincere affections of her honest clergyman suitor, is attracted by a libertine soldier, and realizes too late what advantages she has foregone; despite the best efforts of her mother and friends, Eliza succumbs, more out of loneliness than genuine inclination it seems, to the advances of her now married rake-suitor, falls pregnant, elopes, and dies on delivery of her child. The plot is both unremarkable and familiar in the history of epistolary fiction but its relocation to America adds a new ideological dimension, communicating considerable anxiety about the capacity of the new republic to live up to the ideals of the state on which it is founded. In this case export of the epistolary plot from England to America (as opposed to the import of French and German texts to England earlier in the century) allows a new society to measure itself against an older one from which it both seeks to depart and to which it remains closely tied in terms of language and culture.

The turn to post-colonial, colonial, and imperial territories in epistolary fiction of the 1790s can be seen as an attempt to revive the epistolary novel by finding ‘new’ material on which to stage its familiar plots (marital fidelity tested, seduction and betrayal, the journey which reconfigures the relationships of travellers while it observes new territories). An earlier epistolary fiction, Charlotte Lennox’s last novel, Euphemia (1790), looks both ways, running parallel plots concerning two female protagonist-correspondents in the mid-eighteenth century. The lively Maria Harley secures the love of her wealthy uncle, Sir John Harley, and that of an eligible young relative, Edward Harley, whose reconciliation with her uncle is brought about when her suitor saves Sir John’s life. Her friend Euphemia Lumley, whose father dies in debt, makes a hasty marriage under pressure from her dying mother. Euphemia’s husband, Neville, attempts to repair the fortune he has dissipated by accepting a commission as first lieutenant with one of the independent companies in New York protecting British colonial interests against the French and the native Americans. Euphemia observes the lives of the impoverished Dutch colonists, the manners of the English military, and the strangeness of the Native Americans, forges bonds with a clutch of solitary sensitive young English boys and girls, bears two children, is imperilled with others in a snowbound house as a result of her husband’s impetuosity, and suffers even more intensely when her young son is lost on an expedition with his father (he is only restored to her as an adult having been raised by Native Americans). When Euphemia returns to England, she nurses her husband’s ailing uncle and is rewarded on his death with the inheritance of a fortune. Lennox, who had herself spent three years as a child in New York where her father was a captain of an independent company, brought together the picaresque observational tradition of the epistolary novel with the newly exotic and popular captivity narrative in the inset story of the child raised by Native Americans. 18 A longer tradition is still in play too in the overriding sentimentalism of the stories of the two women (courtship-to-marriage and trial-in-marriage) and the correspondence between them. Maria thus writes to Euphemia as the latter prepares to depart to America:

be assured, neither time nor absence will be able to weaken my affection. —Your idea will always be present with me. I shall dream continually of you, and find no image in my memory so pleasing as that which presents me the time of our being together. You shall have letters for me by every conveyance; and thus, through oceans roll between us, our minds may often meet and converse with each other. 19

Feeling between women and the reforming power of female sympathy is a preoccupation of these imperial epistolary narratives. Where male imperial writers and apologists often represent indigenous peoples as too weak, worn down by oppression and habituated to despotism—in other words feminized—to govern without the support of a ‘liberating’ colonial power, the epistolary tradition’s privileging of female voice often enables the representation of an empowering connection between indigenous people and sympathetic colonial woman. On the sudden death of the benevolent Colonel, Euphemia describes the visit of five Mohawk chiefs to his wife and daughters; the women’s grief ‘drew from them a murmur of sympathising feeling, which was strongly expressed in their looks’ (32).

So too in Phoebe Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), native subjects find relationships with women of feeling and education. In Gibbes’s novel, Sophie, who has travelled to Calcutta with her widowed father, expresses early in the letters she addresses to her friend in England, Arabella, her desire to ‘please a Bramin [ sic ]’ with her ‘perfections of the mental sort’ so that she may ‘become an humble copy of their exemplary and beautiful simplicity’. 20 She befriends a young Brahmin although her affections are won by a noble young Englishman, Doyly; perhaps unsurprisingly the Brahmin is dispatched from the story by a sudden fever and Sophie can chastely promise to ‘raise a pagoda to his memory in my heart, that shall endure till that heart beats no more’ (135). Similarly, in Hamilton’s novel, the first letter from a Hindu Rajah, Zāārmilla, to his male friend and fellow Hindu, Māāndāāra, describes an aesthetic and emotional sympathy with Charlotte Percy, the sister of the young army officer whose injuries from the Rohilla wars he tends. He transcribes for his friend a poem celebrating country retirement and affective familial bonds written by Charlotte and expresses the hope that his care for her brother might ease her grief: ‘Could she be assured, how often my sufferings have been alleviated by the balm of sympathy, and how much the endearing sensibilities of cordial friendship have refreshed my soul, it would be a solace to her affliction.’ 21

Indeed, the encounter with Charlotte’s poetic voice appears to transform Zāāarmilla’s. Until this point he writes in the characteristically extravagant and metaphor-laden style which English writers employed for ‘oriental’ intellectuals (he describes Captain Percy, for instance, as possessed of powers of mind ‘deep and extensive as the wave of the mighty Ganges’ [80]).

Hamilton’s modern editors conclude that the novel’s optimism about integrating different cultures—and especially the surprising symmetry of ancient English feudalism and the values of contemporary Hinduism—are an attempt to demonstrate ‘the possibility that the inhabitants of a small nation can maintain their own culture in harmony with, rather than in hopeless opposition to, the dominant culture of an imperial centre’ (44). This solution, born out of Hamilton’s mixed Scottish and Irish parentage and her establishment in Edinburgh, links her to those writers who, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, turn the sentimental and the epistolary novel to the purposes of the ‘national’ tale and the romance of history: Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Sydney Owenson.

Live Burial: 1800–1824

We have seen that the epistolary novel had shifted its emphasis from plots of domestic intrigue and their resolution to plots of national conflicts and their resolution. The first two decades of the nineteenth century take this process one step further in that the epistolary novel itself becomes a ‘buried’ presence rather than a dominant vehicle in the novel. Few novels retain or sustain the fiction of an entire narrative delivered through the letters of one or more correspondents and when they do so it is with an attitude of nostalgia and indeed in the context of recounting and overcoming an unwanted legacy of the past. In this concluding section we will consider Maria Edgeworth’s Leonora (1805), Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806), and Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet (1824).

New life had been breathed into the epistolary tradition—again from abroad and again from France—with the success in 1802 of Anne Louise Germaine de Staël’s six-volume Delphine . Staël’s intelligent 20-year-old widow wins the admiring love of Léonce de Mondeville, the man designed to become the husband of Matilda, the daughter of Delphine’s late husband’s relative to whom Delphine has made over a large part of her fortune. However, her generous role in the unhappy love affair of another friend is misinterpreted by Léonce and results, through the machinations of Matilda’s mother, in his casting off Delphine. Their passion resumes when the misunderstanding is cleared up but Delphine interprets the death of another suitor, Valorbe, along with that of Léonce’s wife Matilda and her newborn son as a prohibition on their eventual union. When Léonce is taken up in September of 1792 by revolutionaries and Delphine’s efforts to save him fail she takes poison to ensure that she dies with the man she has always loved. Staël’s novel, like Rousseau’s before it, made sure that the transgressive desires of its heroine were closed down in the novel’s conclusion but it was their freethinking expression—and especially the advocacy of divorce—which made the novel both attractive and scandalous. Thus, Léonce declares in the early stages of the courtship with Delphine: ‘our souls would understand each other, if I were free from restraint’. 22

Edgeworth, with her customary facility, both exploits and critiques the French freedoms of Delphine in Leonora . Leonora, like Delphine, is a generous-hearted woman who, despite the concerns of her high-principled mother, invites Olivia to stay with her family at their country estate in an effort to repair the latter’s damaged reputation. Olivia’s letters to a French confidante reveal that she is indeed a reckless and rather silly devotee of the European novel who has cultivated a lover and abandoned her child in misguided imitation of the protagonists in the epistolary novels of Goethe and Rousseau. Olivia sets her sights on Leonora’s apparently cold and critical husband; when Leonora realizes her friend’s perfidy, Olivia leaves and the husband follows. His correspondence with his blunt friend, General B., reveals that he has fallen in love with Olivia’s apparently absolute love for him whereas he considers his wife’s superficial calmness of temperament an indication of her lack of feeling. He intends to take up a post with the embassy to Russia and Olivia intends to travel with him but she demands a total break with his wife and young family. Leonora gives birth to a sickly boy who dies, the husband (Mr. L.) also falls ill and is only saved from death when Leonora hastens to his side. When Olivia’s letters to her confidante and amatory conspirator, Madame P., are forwarded to Mr. L., the covering letter is enough to reveal to Mr. L. his mistress’s lightness and he feels free to break with her and return to his devoted wife.

Olivia’s addiction to the French and German epistolary novel is represented as the cause of her sexual flightiness and her inability to engage in an authentic and mutual relationship with either man or woman. Mr. L. comes to this realization late and summarizes for the reader:

Rousseau, it has been said, never really loved any woman but his own Julie; I have lately been tempted to think that Olivia never really loved any man but St. Preux. Werter, perhaps, and some other German heroes, might dispute her heart even with St. Preux: but as for me, I begin to be aware that I am loved only as a feeble resemblance of those divine originals (to whom, however, my character bears not the slightest similarity), and I am often indirectly, and sometimes directly, reproached with my inferiority to imaginary models … I am continually reviled for not using a romantic language, which I have never learned; and which, as far as I can judge, is foreign to all natural feeling. 23

Edgeworth’s is not just a critique of the romantic novel; the reference is repeatedly and specifically to its epistolary manifestations. Leonora was Edgeworth’s only epistolary novel. ‘Natural feeling’ is here not best expressed through the medium of the foreign epistolary mode but in the English network novel which announces its separation from its foreign forebears. The epistolary mode itself looks antiquated and backward, a primitive form of expression.

Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl is also its author’s only venture into epistolary fiction. The novel opens with an exchange of letters between a father and his self-indulgent son, Horatio Mortimer, who is banished to an Irish estate to escape a life of indulgence and debt as a young lawyer in London. The remainder of the novel is rendered through letters from Horatio to a silent addressee, ‘J. D. Esq., M.P.’ Young Mortimer falls from a parapet wall as he peers in at the family of the Prince of Inismore and listens to the witchery of the harp played by the lovely princess Glorvina to her father and his chaplain, Father John. As Horatio recovers, he is extensively instructed in Irish lore and wisdom, plunged into the mythic time of the native Irish to leave behind the tiresome stadial accounts of more or less civilized cultures clashing and requiring forceful appropriation and readjustment which characterized post-Union representations of Ireland and especially those associated with Edgeworth’s Whiggish Anglo-Irish fiction. 24 The novel concludes with the union in the marriage of Glorvina and Horatio between apparent enemies, two forms of landed aristocracy, ‘Old Irish and New English’. 25 If Horatio bears the name of the English hero against the French, Nelson, the name of his beloved, Glorvina, means ‘sweet voice’ in Gaelic; as the novel progresses, Glorvina’s powers of musicality and voice rapidly overtake and consume the device of the letter. Improbably long letters recall long conversations and are punctuated by ever-expanding explanatory footnotes regarding Irish history and folklore with no pretence that they belong to the time or place of the ostensible narrator, Horatio. Ultimately, however, Glorvina becomes the repository of all Irishness. Indeed towards the close of the novel, Mortimer announces: ‘I cannot promise you any more Irish history. I fear my Hiberniana is closed, and a volume of more dangerous, more delightful tendency, draws towards its bewitching subject every truant thought’ (155).

If Edgeworth’s novel declared the supremacy of English epistolarity as the death of the ‘foreign’ epistolary form (in Leonora a concluding letter points to a written form other than the letter as the source of sentimental moral guidance), Owenson’s declares the victory of Irish ‘voice’ in capturing and subduing the summary by letter of Irish wisdom under production by the English hero. Mortimer swiftly follows his introductory salvo to this letter with the information that he is making ‘rapid progress in the Irish language’ in which he proves his capacity by conjugating the verb ‘to love’ for his mistress-instructress. The new ‘volume’ opened at the novel’s close is, it is implied, not a volume of letters but a more flexible combination of voice and narration, a new union of ‘forms’.

So, too, Scott, in the only Waverley novel that incorporated a substantial portion of letters, presents narrative rendered solely through letters as a mode of the past, not suited to modern purposes. Redgauntlet is set in the summer of 1765 and revolves around a fictional plot to restore the Stuart line by Scottish Jacobites. The lively literary Darsie Latimer writes to his more sober school-friend Alan Fairford who is training for the law. In the course of the novel Darsie is abducted and imprisoned by the mysterious Herries (Redgauntlet), is attracted to his lovely niece, Lilias, only to discover that she is his sister, seized by Redgauntlet from their mother, a Hanoverian loyalist, who had kept the true heir from his Jacobite connections. All parties including the Pretender himself come together in an inn on the English border only for it to be revealed that the Jacobite plot has been long known by the Hanoverian government. Herries now abandons his violent plans and retires to a monastery, Alan is married to Lilias, and Darsie can take up his rightful identity.

As so often in the history of epistolary fiction the plot of spying and conspiracy is interwoven with the plot of sentimental friendship and heterosexual love. The novel is preoccupied with shaping a reformed masculinity based on mutual friendship and understanding quite different from the violent and wilful loyalty of one male to another idealized in his absence. Herries’s overt displays of authority and cruelty are revealed as signs of weakness whereas the protective love of Alan for Darsie offers the prospect of a future community which finds its strength in sociability and imaginative sympathy.

The final nail in the coffin of the epistolary novel is driven by the introduction of a concluding letter by ‘Dr. Dryasdust’ to ‘the Author of Waverley’ who summarizes his researches into the later fates of the characters in the story. History and historiography—a variety of ‘researchers’ in ‘letters … diaries … or other memoranda’ (378)—have now firmly replaced the letter mode. Mixed narration, like the mixed unions of these later national tales, proves more comprehensive and more adaptable to the purposes of the early nineteenth-century novel. Epistolarity remains throughout the history of the novel a significant and lively presence but always framed by other forms of narration. From the 1820s onwards the epistolary novel is invoked as a creation and creature of the past, more often invoked to mark distance rather than proximity to a living present of the modern novel.

Select Bibliography

Brant, Clare , Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006 ).

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Bray, Joe , Epistolary Correspondences: Representations of Consciousness (London and New York: Routledge: 2003 ).

Browne, Christopher , Getting the Message: The Story of the British Post Office (London: Alan Sutton, 1995 ).

MacArthur, Elizabeth J. , Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990 ).

McKenzie, Alan , Sent as a Gift: Eight Correspondences from the Eighteenth-Century (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1993 ).

Perry, Ruth , Women, Letters and the Novel (New York: AMS Press, 1980 ).

Siegert, Bernhard , Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999 ).

Whyman, Susan , The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660 – 1800 (Oxford: OUP, 2009 ).

Frances Burney , Evelina , ed. Edward A. Bloom (Oxford: OUP, 1970), 20 .

Walter Scott , Redgauntlet: A Tale of the Eighteenth Century , ed. G. A. M. Wood with David Hewitt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997), 125 .

Clare Brant , Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 27 .

Elizabeth Lefanu , The India Voyage (London, 1804), 1: 39 .

Peter Garside , ‘The English Novel in the Romantic Era: Consolidation and Dispersal’, in Garside , James Raven , and Rainer Schöwerling (eds.), The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles , 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 2: 54 .

Godfrey Frank Singer , The Epistolary Novel: Its Origin, Development, Decline, and Residuary Influence (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 99–100, 101 .

Garside, ‘The English Novel’, 53. Black’s count of English epistolary fictions was as follows: 160 (1780s); 155 (1790s); 62 (1800s); 38 (1810s); 26 (1820s). See Frank Gees Black , The Epistolary Novel in the Late Eighteenth Century (Eugene, OR: U of Oregon P, 1940), 160–8 .

Thomas O. Beebee , Epistolary Fiction in Europe 1500–1850 (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 8, 168 . For a similar approach, see Janet Gurkin Altman , Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1982) .

Nicola Watson , Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790–1825: Interpreted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 26 .

Mary Favret , Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: CUP, 2004) .

See especially Favret, Romantic Correspondence , 133–96, in which she charts Jane Austen’s representation of the letter as impediment to ‘reading’ character in her major novels.

Robyn L. Schiffman , ‘Werther and the Epistolary Novel’, European Romantic Review 19 (2008), 430 .

I am particularly grateful to the work of Debbie McVitty on Elizabeth Griffith. See her ‘Familiar Collaboration and Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Elizabeth Griffith, Sarah Fielding and Susannah and Margaret Minifie’ (unpublished Oxford DPhil thesis, 2007), chapter 4 (archived at ORA [Oxford Research Archive] [ http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:626a7d25-a7b8-448c-acef-cba199e63f54 ].

Elizabeth Griffith , The Delicate Distress , ed. Cynthia Booth Ricciardi and Susan Staves (Lexington: Kentucky UP, 1997), 19 .

Henry Mackenzie , Julia de Roubigné A Tale. Told in Letters (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777), 1: 82 .

Charlotte Smith , Desmond , ed. Antje Blank and Janet Todd (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1997), 193 .

See Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel , 41–4, and Christopher Bundock , ‘The (Inoperative) Epistolary Community in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy’, European Romantic Review 20 (2009), 709–20 .

Susan Kubica Howard , ‘Seeing Colonial America and Writing Home about It: Charlotte Lennox’s Euphemia, Epistolarity, and the Feminine Picturesque’, Studies in the Novel 37/3 (2005), 273–91 .

Charlotte Lennox , Euphemia , ed. Susan Kubica Howard (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1998), 188 .

Phoebe Gibbes , Hartly House, Calcutta , ed. Michael J. Franklin (New Delhi: OUP, 2007), 51 .

Elizabeth Hamilton , Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah , ed. Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1999), 93 .

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël , Delphine (London, 1836), 1: 85 .

Maria Edgeworth , Leonora , ed. Marilyn Butler and Susan Manley (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999), 127 .

See Thomas Tracey , ‘The Mild Irish Girl: Domesticating the Irish National Tale’, Éire-Ireland 39/1–2 (2004), 81–109 .

Claire Connolly , ‘Introduction: The Politics of Love in the Wild Irish Girl’, in Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale , ed. Claire Connolly and Stephen Copley (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), p. lv .

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