The framing passages of "The Problem of Pain" are part of a private correspondence. Might a first person short story like "The Bitter Bread" be read as a letter from its narrator? The third Maurai story, "Windmill," is, if not a letter, then a report to an admiralty.
Closely related to private correspondences are private journals. (Indeed, some journal writers might begin: "Dear Diary...") Anderson's "Wings of Victory" and "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy" are extracts from private journals.
BOOK THREE of James Blish's They Shall Have Stars is introduced by a letter from one character to another, dated 4th January 2020 - in the future.
Dracula is related through letters, diary entries and newspaper reports.
Fitzwilliam Darcy writes an explanatory letter to Elizabeth Bennet.
One master of the fictional correspondence is CS Lewis:
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I too have read DRACULA, favoring the annotated edition by McNally and Florescu.
We do see Chunderban Desai reading extracts from a letter sent to him in reply to enquiries sent to Terra, in THE DAY OF THEIR RETURN.
I have two books that are partly or entirely epistolary: The MEMOIRS of Gen. William T. Sherman, and SPIRITUAL LETTERS, by Abbot John Chapman, OSB.
Sherman was fond of including many letters verbatim in his memoirs. Abbot Chapman was the greatest Catholic Biblical scholar of the first decades of the 20th century.
And I have read Lewis' THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS. And I have one of the Loeb Classics volumes collecting some of the letters of St. Augustine.
Ad astra! Sean
The problem is that letters are not inherently interesting -- and in fiction they're a description of a description. They lack immediacy.
In MALCOLM, Lewis makes the letters interesting, I think, provided of course that we are interested in the issues discussed. We read only Lewis' side of the correspondence. Malcolm, addressed as a friend from whom Lewis has learned important truths, has a wife who comments on the letters and a son who becomes ill so that the question of petitionary prayer becomes immediate and urgent. Lewis could have written a novel about these characters but instead we read only one side of a fictional correspondence which is made to seem very real and plausible.
Oh, yes, you can make letters interesting. But it takes a very high degree of skill.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
The points made by you and Paul reminded me that Gen. Sherman was a vigorous and forceful letter writer, making many of the letters he inserted into his MEMOIRS interesting.
I had the honor of corresponding with Poul Anderon over the course of no less than 24 snail mail letters, with him responding to every single one of my sometimes far too long scribblings. I was careful to make copies of the letters I wrote to keep with Anderson's replies--because having both sides of such a correspondence provides context and makes the letters more interesting.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, to Both!
It was agonizing to me when Anderson stated in one of his letters that it was not his custom to keep most of his letters and mss. once he was finished with them!
Dang glad I made copies of my letters to keep with his replies!
Ad astra! Sean
Lewis was a skillful writer. I completely disagree with him as a philosopher.
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