Subjective response to letters in nineteenth-century fictions

Ellen Moody

Note 8 to the author's "Partly Told In Letters: Trollope's Story-telling Art." not in print version indicates a link to material not in the original version. [GPL].

While one can find many fleeting brief uses of a subjective response to a letter in fictions where intensity is required, e.g, not in print version Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) or Margaret Oliphant's ghost story, 'The Open Door' (1882), there are only a few nineteeth-century novels in English where this interwoven subjectivity becomes the basic narrative method for long stretches of the narrative. Even here either the sequence is kept relatively short or it's not central to the method of the fiction as a whole: the Portsmouth episode in not in print version Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814); the opening third of Sir Walter Scott's Redgauntlet (1824); scattered places in the interspersed diary-journal and letters in the long middle section of Anne Brontë;'s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848); in a couple of chapters of George Meredith's Evan Harrington (1861); and throughout the third story of not in print version Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, 'Memory at Cranford, or Old Letters' (1852). Day points out instances of this sort of mixed narration in fiction before the mid- eighteenth century, but it is usually crudely done and without the use of free indirect speech.

Last modified 7 October 2001