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The Art of Letter Writing

Epistolary

The Letters of a Portuguese Nun (Mariann...
The Great English Letter Writers : Volum... (by Dawson, William James)
The Great English Letter Writers : Volum... (by Dawson, William James)
Cárcel de Amor : (Sevilla, 1492). (by Diego De San Pedro)
The Art of Letter Writing; A Practical M... (by Fowler, Nathaniel Clark)
Juvenile Correspondence; Or, Letters Sui... (by Lovechild, Mrs.)
Julie; Ou, La Nouvelle Helose (by Rousseau, Jean Jacques)
Three Guineas (by Woolf, Virginia)

In the era of quickness and disposability, a personal touch goes a long way. And if you mean to send a personal touch a long distance, what can be more meaningful than a handwritten letter?

Letters--also called epistle or epistolary--carry psychological weight. The letter is the crux of object and idea. If it is handwritten, it is also tinged with something a bit more personal. One can almost see the writer’s hand tracing each character, and the distance between sender and recipient narrows if just for a moment.

Formal letters come with pretty clear rules. Informal letters are as free ranging as the seas, and their open-endedness is one reason they are written today as they were centuries ago.

Open-endedness aside, there are bylines that differentiate effective and ineffective epistle. Lewis Carroll makes note of some of these in Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing. After some initial suggestions about writing legibly, including a return address, and keeping stamps handy, he gets into details of basic correspondence etiquette between friends:

The best subject, to begin with, is your friend's last letter. Write with the letter open before you. Answer his questions, and make any remarks his letter suggests. Then go on to what you want to say yourself. This arrangement is more courteous, and pleasanter for the reader, than to fill the letter with your own invaluable remarks, and then hastily answer your friend's questions in a postscript. Your friend is much more likely to enjoy your wit, after his own anxiety for information has been satisfied. (17, Carroll)

Down-to-earth words from a fantastical man.

In an old collection of letters from children as young as four years old called Juvenile Correspondences, one child begins a letter to her brother "I have just begun to write words" (18, Lovechild). The collection was compiled in the hopes of encouraging more children to write letters more for amusement than for business. It also supplied instructions for how to ingrain these practices in their childhoods, which included making the children dictate letters before they were even capable of holding a pen. This was the apparent first step in making letter writing fun.

Epistle inevitably brings to mind The Epistles, otherwise known as the Apostle Paul’s 14 letters to different churches which comprise a large portion of the New Testament of the Bible. Some scholars dispute whether Paul wrote all of the letters himself or if some of them were written using his name as pseudonym. Nevertheless, the letters are formative texts in Christian theology.

Authors and artists eventually saw the potential of letter writing as a vehicle for stories, and created epistolary novels, or stories told through a series of letters, diary entries, and the like. One of the first noted epistolary novels is Carcel de Amor by Diego de San Pedro, written in 1485. San Pedro's book emerged at a time when a handful of other authors were inserting letters into their works of fiction. Various forms of epistolary usage in novels continued and diverged into The Letters of a Portuguese Nun in 1669 by Gabriel Joseph de la Vergne, a depiction of a nun’s passionate and forbidden love. The mix of the epistolary in straightforward fiction might have been the earliest clue-in to the coming modern and postmodern storytelling of our time.

Other epistolary novels include Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie or the Nouvelle Héloïse.

Highest among the traits of letter writing is the invocation of slowness. The letter may be read again and again. Ideas from it enter into the recipient's world in a manner dissimilar from conversation. Where spoken words fall so easily by the wayside, written words might find their purchase.

For further reading, check out The Great English Letter Writers Volume 1 and Volume 2, and The Art of Letter Writing by Nathaniel Clark Fowler.

By Thad Higa