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'What a delightful place Bath is,' said Mrs Allen, as they sat down near the great clock, after parading around the room till they were tired; 'and how pleasant it would be if we had any acquaintance here.'2
'Oh, who can ever be tired of Bath?' (NA, Ch. 10)
The formal evolution of the English novel really began in the mid 1600s, an era which witnessed the expansion of the memoir- and epistolary-novel of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and then the development of the omniscient third-person narration. This has continued to dominate until the present time. Letters of a Portuguese Nun, the first notable example of the epistolary novel in English, translated from the French in 1678, was followed in 1683 when Aphra Behn published Love-Letters Between a Noblemanand His Sister. Numerous tales of illicit love subsequently appeared, and by the time Richardson wrote Pamela in 1741, it was almost as if he felt obligated to rescue the novel from its now tainted reputation. But what emerged was a victim of its own virtue: the superlative recommendation of the form, its intense subjective immediacy and analysis, is open to subversion by the superlative shortcoming, its vulnerability to charges of implausible absurdity. Nevertheless, the form flourished between the 1740s and 1800 and, after this, was subjected to experimentation; Austen became a master.
Letters form a significant part of Austen's narratives; at times they are of critical and formal importance to plot and character development.3 In Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1818), letters are not only used to relate the lives of those far away (Fanny Price, isolated in Portsmouth, hears of the doings in Mansfield Park and London only through this medium; so does Anne Elliot, in Bath, hankering after news from Uppercross and Lyme) but to shock characters in to major self-assessments by forcing them to confront the ironic discrepancy between appearance and reality; one only has to think of Darcy's letter to Elizabeth. Letters divide and join, hurt and heal. And, most importantly of all, perhaps, they directly teach characters not only about others but about themselves. In addition, they indirectly teach the reader about a world that has disappeared, and can only be resurrected through their imaginative co-operation...