The Converse of the Pen: Acts of Intimacy in the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter.

Abstract

Though historians of English literature have long labeled eighteenth century golden age of letter writing, few have paid more than lip service to unique epistolary craftsmanship of period. Bruce Redford corrects this omission with first sustained investigation of eighteenth-century familiar letter as a literary form in its own right. His study supplies reader with a critical approach and biographical perspective for appreciating genre that defined an era. Redford examines six masters of talking letter: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, William Cowper, Thomas Gray, Horace Walpole, James Boswell, and Samuel Johnson. All seek paradoxical goal of artful spontaneity. Each exploits distinctive resources of eighteenth-century letter writer: a flexible conversational manner, a repertoire of literary and social allusion, a flair for dramatic impersonation. The voices of these letter writers make distance, presence, in Samuel Richardson's phrase, by devising substitutes for gesture, vocal inflection, and physical context, turning each letter into a performance an act. The resulting verbal constructs create a mysterious tension between claims of fact and possibilities of art. Redford recovers a neglected literary form and makes possible a deeper understanding of major eighteenth-century writers who devoted much of their talent and time to the converse of pen.

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