This study examines letters, epistolary novels, and transatlantic epistolary culture in the long eighteenth century, offering an analysis of letters that peels away the ideology of privacy that has inflected our readings of the letter genre and of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel. Prescriptions for letter writing in this period and before stressed an equivalence of letter with person—that a letter is presence and should be what Cicero called "written conversation." Yet both formally and historically, letters are marked by their own tendency to circulate outside the pair of sender and receiver. Characters in epistolary fictions certainly evince great awareness of this generic feature—that letters tend to go astray—and the conditions of early modern epistolarity mean that letters don't easily inhabit a private sphere.

Starting with Aphra Behn's Loveletters between a Nobleman and his Sister (1685-7), in which Behn takes the form of the love letter novel and adapts it for use as Tory propaganda, I show that Behn's use of letters to tell the story of the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion highlights the instability of the letter's public/private status. Moving further into the rise of the novel, my chapter on Samuel Richardson shows that his Familiar Letters announces the importance of literacy and refined epistolary practice in building social capital, while Clarissa questions whether the system actually functions as promised in the Familiar Letters for female subjects. A chapter on American epistolary pamphlets, especially those by women, and adaptations of Richardson, like Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797), argues that the climate of epistolary debate in America led to letter novels that retained a public, declamatory strain alongside the intimate, confessional Richardsonian tradition. Finally, I examine a pair of epistolary novels that confront Atlantic slavery from different perspectives. Henry Mackenzie's Julia de Roubignè (1777) is one of the first novels to depict the living conditions of slaves in the West Indies, and the anonymously authored novel A Woman of Color, until recently out of print since its publication in 1808. Both use epistolary form to very different political purposes.