Epistolary novels and psychological action

Ellen Moody

Note 17 to the author's "Partly Told In Letters: Trollope's Story-telling Art"

Possibly the most famous epistolary novel in which nothing outward happens is Johann Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Trollope probably read a nineteenth-century version of the type in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Falkland (1827). Characters who are paralysed by a dilemma which occasions their story are common in Trollope's later novels, but the sort of triangular story in which hero and heroines are kept apart and conflicts arise between the need for money and the desire for love that is closest in its use of epistolary technique to what we find in Lucy Morris and Frank Greystock's story in The Eustace Diamonds is the story of Harry Clavering's vacillation between Florence Burton and Julia, Lady Brabazon in The Claverings; the large number of and reliance upon letters in that novel is justified by its inward focus. A similar situation arises between Lily Dale and Adolphus Crosbie in The Small House, but it is resolved by Crosbie's ignoble letter interwoven half-way through the book (31).

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Last modified 6 October 2001