An epistolary novel is a novel told through documents its characters write: letters, traditionally, but also diary entries, emails, reports and newspaper clippings. There is no narrator outside the documents, so the reader assembles the story from what each writer chose to put on paper.
The word comes from the Greek epistolē, a letter. Novels in letters were already circulating in the late seventeenth century, among them Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87), usually attributed to Aphra Behn, but the form had its great run in the eighteenth. Samuel Richardson started Pamela (1740) while he was compiling a book of model letters for readers who needed help writing their own, and his Clarissa (1747–48), at roughly 970,000 words, is usually counted among the longest novels in English. The form never went away. Its modern versions swap the post for email, chat logs and interview transcripts.
Epistolary novel examples
I have great trouble, and some comfort, to acquaint you with.
Pamela, a fifteen-year-old maid, writes home to her parents about her employer, Mr. B., and his advances. When he has her carried off to his Lincolnshire estate, she keeps writing without knowing whether any letter will get out, and the letters turn into a journal. The book was a bestseller, and within months Henry Fielding answered it with Shamela (1741), a parody that mocks, among much else, a heroine who reports events on paper while they are still happening.
The novel is 175 dated letters, most of them between the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, two aristocrats who plan seductions as a game. Each writer changes voice with the recipient: tender to a target, cool and amused to an accomplice. Valmont writes one love letter to the devout Madame de Tourvel using a courtesan as his desk. Tourvel reads a confession. The reader knows where it was written. Even the front matter plays along: a publisher's note doubts the letters are genuine, and the editor's preface that follows insists they are.
How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them.
Stoker builds the book from journals, letters, telegrams, a doctor's diary recorded on phonograph cylinders and a newspaper cutting that reprints the log of a ship that reaches Whitby with its dead captain tied to the wheel. Mina Harker types it all up and puts every item in chronological order, so the heroes become the book's editors. The closing note admits the catch: of all that material there is "hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewriting."
Celie, a poor Black girl in rural Georgia, writes to God because there is no one else she can tell. The letters are in her own vernacular, and what she has suffered lands harder for being said so plainly. Years later she learns that her husband has been hiding her sister Nettie's letters from Africa. From then on she writes to Nettie instead of God, and the book becomes a correspondence across an ocean. It won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Charlie Gordon writes "progress reports" for the scientists whose surgery is meant to raise his intelligence. The early reports are full of misspellings and run-on sentences. As the surgery takes hold, the spelling, grammar and vocabulary climb. When the effect begins to fade, so does the prose, and the reader watches him lose ground one report at a time. No narrator has to explain what is happening. The documents show it.
When Bernadette Fox vanishes just before a family trip to Antarctica, her teenage daughter, Bee, gathers emails, memos and transcripts to work out why, adding short stretches of her own narration. The method is Stoker's, but these documents were written for work, school and a feud with the neighbors, not for posterity, so their writers give themselves away without meaning to.
Types of epistolary novel
| Type | Who writes | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| TypeOne correspondent | Who writesOne character, with the replies offstage | ExamplesThe Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) |
| TypeTwo correspondents | Who writesAn exchange, both sides shown | ExamplesGriffin and Sabine (1991), This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019) |
| TypeMany correspondents | Who writesThree or more writers, often working against each other | ExamplesLes Liaisons dangereuses (1782), The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2008) |
| TypeDiary novel | Who writesOne writer, writing to themselves | ExamplesThe Diary of a Nobody (1892), Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) |
| TypeDocumentary novel | Who writesMixed records gathered by a compiler | ExamplesDracula (1897), World War Z (2006) |
In This Is How You Lose the Time War, two agents on opposite sides of a war through time trade letters. The book had two authors as well: Max Gladstone wrote Red's letters and Amal El-Mohtar wrote Blue's, which is one way to keep two voices apart.
In your manuscript
Start with the reason anyone is writing. Every document needs a writer, a reader and a cause: who is writing, to whom, and why today. The addressee sets the voice. People are franker with a sister than with a landlord, and franker still with a diary.
Then use what the form gives you for free.
- Gaps. Time passes between documents without a transition. A letter that goes unanswered for three weeks is an event.
- Dramatic irony. With several writers, the reader sees what each one hides from the others, as in Laclos.
- Self-betrayal. Writers reveal themselves in what they leave out, which makes the form a natural home for an unreliable narrator.
- Texture. Dates, sign-offs, a postscript added in a hurry. Small formal details carry character.
The form fails in predictable ways. The first is the one Fielding mocked: characters writing in the middle of the action, or copying out pages of dialogue word for word, which nobody does in a real letter. Let the big scenes happen offstage and arrive in the next document, already digested. The second is the "as you know" letter, which explains things both correspondents already know. That is an info dump with a stamp on it.
The third is voices that blur. Cover the signature, and if you can't tell who wrote the letter, revise until you can. Drafting each correspondent's letters in a separate file, then interleaving them, helps. The last is the missing compiler. Decide who gathered the documents and why, even if the book never says. That settles what goes in, in what order, and whether the collection has an agenda.
As you know: Dear Ruth, As you know, I've been working at the cannery since Dad's accident in March, and Tom and I still aren't speaking after what he said at the funeral. Today Mr. Hale offered me the manager job, which would mean staying here another year.
Written to Ruth: Dear Ruth, Mr. Hale offered me the manager job today. I said I'd think about it, which he took as a yes, which I suppose it is. Don't tell Tom. It isn't a secret. I'd just like one thing this year that he doesn't get an opinion on.
The second letter assumes what a sister would know, so the reader has to infer the history. Its last lines also set up the next document: a letter from Ruth to Tom.
On the page, keep each document's header consistent (date line, salutation, sign-off), because with several writers the headers are how the reader keeps track. For email and texts, sender, recipient and time are enough.
Epistolary novel vs. diary novel and frame story
| Form | Written for | How to tell |
|---|---|---|
| FormEpistolary novel | Written forAnother character | How to tellLetters addressed to someone else |
| FormDiary novel | Written forThe writer | How to tellDated entries, no replies |
| FormDocumentary novel | Written forOfficials, readers, the record | How to tellA compiler gathers papers not written as a story |
| FormFrame story | Written forA listener in the book | How to tellSomeone tells the main story to someone else |
| FormFirst-person narration | Written forAn unnamed reader | How to tellOne continuous account, no addressee |
The test is whether the text exists inside the story. If a character could pick up the page and read it, the book is epistolary in the broad sense. In the strict sense, only letters count. The forms also overlap. A frame story can be epistolary: Robert Walton's letters to his sister open and close Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), and Victor's story sits inside them. Plain first-person narration is the easiest to mix up with this form. The narrator speaks in first person too, but tells the story as one continuous account, addressed to nobody in particular.
If you are still choosing between letters, a diary and an ordinary first-person narrator, start with the guide to point of view: a letter writer is a first-person narrator with an addressee and a date, and knows only what that narrator would. To plan the order the documents arrive in, list them one per scene in a novel outline before you draft.
