Censored sentiments

This book offers a new perspective on women as letter writers and on the eighteenth-century increase in, and subsequent decline of, epistolary fiction. In order to better understand the role epistolary fiction played in English, French, Italian, and to a lesser extent, American society, it is necessary to read such fiction in the context of conduct books with their theories of what women should be and their reflections on literature. Such a reading takes into account not only letter writers and their addressees, but also the censors who read, intercepted, suppressed, criticized, corrected, forged, altered, falsified, misdirected, censored, and rewrote female letters in an effort to achieve a perfect specimen of female epistolary writing. The crude form of domestic censorship that relied on physical control of incoming and outgoing letters - interception of letters by parents and guardians, rationing of writing materials - notably visible in such early epistolary novels as Aphra Behn's Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister, Mary Hearne's The Lovers' Week, and Eliza Haywood's Love-Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier gave way to a much more subtle form of censorship, seducing the letter writer into a regime of self-imposed restrictions on letter content and direction. The shift from coercion to self-control relates to Foucault's notion of the disciplines and corresponds to the gradual' transformation of a society of spectacle to that of modern discipline. Samuel Richardson's Clarissa illustrates this shift because it proves the inefficacy of the control imposed from the outside and advocates the necessity of placing responsibility onto the letter writer tutored in decorum by conduct books. Clarissa commits a "sin of communication" that leads to her "ruin" and death because she has disregarded the guidelines for safe correspondence provided by conduct-book writers. Clarissa reflects the gradual substitution of the letter as a means of transgression to the letter as a means of control and manipulation. This book also analyzes the strategies of those letter writers who have learned the lessons in Clarissa and who try to appease the censors by resorting to caution, convention, and cliche - in particular Fanny Burney's Evelina and Jane Austen's Love and Friendship and Lady Susan. It also considers Ruth Hall, a novel by the nineteenth-century American writer Fanny Fern, and two works by contemporary Italian authors - Dacia Maraini's Lettere a Marina and Oriana Fallaci's Lettera a un bambino mai nato that can be read as critiques of the earlier theories about women and letters.