Epistolary Mysteries

I am a woman of letters: I love writing and receiving long, newsy missives filled with gossip, tales of professional rivalries and triumphs, and ideas for the various big projects and life events that friends are contemplating.

Alas, no one sends me long letters anymore. My mail is bills, bold political pleas for support, and more muted requests for assistance from struggling arts organizations.

My most faithful correspondent of decades is juggling a legal career, child rearing, and a small business alongside her own writing. This friend of my youth is, understandably, not keen to receive or send accounts of her doings that require stamps, a postal box, and proper writing paper.

But I do miss her Cambridge-era letters, sent on onion skin or in the form of foldable Royal Mail paper/envelopes. I’m not describing this well, but one would carefully undo the envelope and all of the writing was on the lined underside.

When I did an Austen seminar in grad school we learned about the Regency era thrifty practice of writing both horizontally and vertically. My handwriting is wretched and would be unreadable in this format.

This comes to mind because I’m reading Jane K. Cleland’s very fun Jane Austen’s Lost Letters. The author did a terrific Sisters in Crime webinar some weeks ago on plotting; I’m also looking forward to her podcast episode.

Austen scholars wish we had more of the slim number of letters: six novels, some juvenilia, and some ephemeral fragments seems like merely a good start. Letters and other personal materials (oh, for a lost diary!) help provide a fuller picture of a writer who was more demure in company than in her fiction or her intimate correspondence.

But Austen died at 41, in 1817, of what some believed to be Addison’s Disease but is now more commonly attributed to lupus or perhaps another autoimmune issue. And there are wilder theories, including the arsenic poisoning one based on an exceptionally creative reading of Austen’s letters.

(This is, of course, a crucial Austen year: she was born in 1775, and celebrations are planned in both scholarly and popular contexts, and centring on Bath, a city she disliked yet which has become the chief keeper of her memory.)

I’ve just finished reading Janice Hallett’s The Examiner, her longest and weirdest book to date. It’s nearly impossible to summarize, although the premise seems straightforward (please note the word choice): an external examiner asks for guidance when the documentation of a new graduate program merging fine arts and commerce raises troubling questions.

Much of the novel is written as text, email, WhatsApp, and internal course communication messages–Hallett’s had a lot of fun with this contemporary take on epistolary fiction in all of her works to date.

But this is a much more convoluted plot than in her earlier Alperton books, and while it worked for me, some readers have objected to the various machinations that are only revealed in the last third or so of the novel. Still: even if you set it aside, baffled, I promise you it’s worth a try.

Cleland’s novel is not written in an epistolary form, but its events centre around the ostensible revelation of two lost Austen letters: one to Cassandra, her sister, and one to her cousin Fanny. I’m only a few chapters in, but Cleland knows her Austen and crafts great characters.

To close with Dickinson, as I must turn to teaching:

This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me—
The simple News that Nature told—
With tender Majesty

Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see—
For love of Her—Sweet—countrymen—
Judge tenderly—of Me

Wouldn’t it be lovely if the lost art of letter-writing was reclaimed?