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Everybody allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiar female -- Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
As Jane Austen's comment underscores, the genre of letter writing has frequently been identified as a female form. Many texts by feminists and literary historians have explored and analyzed the relationship between the epistolary form and women's writing, from Ruth Perry's initializing book, Women, Letters and the Novel (1980) to Olga Kenyon's recent anthology, 800 Years of Women's Letters. We can now add to this list Favret's original study of English women's letter writing of the Romantic period.(f.1)
The identification of letter writing as a female form stems from women's historical marginalization from the public sphere. Women writers, impeded from occupying the authoritative voice of philosophy or science, retreated into the softer, more feminine space of familiar letters and epistolary fiction. Certainly, this "fiction of letters," -- the phrase Mary Favret uses to designate particular theories of the letter -- bears itself out in the reality of women's writing in the eighteenth century. The vast majority of epistolary novels were written by women. But most scholarship on the association between women and letters concentrates on the eighteenth century; in fact, many traditional literary critics assert that the epistolary genre ceased to exist after the emergence of Romanticism. Mary Favret's book is a refreshing revision of traditional feminist and literary interpretations of women and letters,...