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:
Kaor, Paul!
ReplyDeleteI 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