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The
Epistolarium: On Theorizing Letters and Correspondences
SAGE Publications, Inc.200410.1191/0967550704ab014oa
LizStanley
University of Newcastle, UK, liz.stanley@newcastle.ac.uk
Address
for correspondence: Liz Stanley, Sociology, Claremont Bridge Building, University
of Newcastle, Newcastle NE1 7RU, UK; Email: liz.stanley@newcastle.ac.uk
Why don't I (do I?) write
letters? I do write `a diary, of a kind'; and, while I used to worry about
not keeping `a proper diary', this has evolved into something I'm comfortable
with, fieldwork notebooks that I write rigorously at important research junctures.
However, perhaps emails serve the same purpose for me that letters used to?
Or is it that my letters were never very important, being `mainly business',
or that I am, oh horror, locked into `personal' writings rather than interpersonal
ones? But then, what about my public writing, the articles and book chapters
and books that I produce for publication purposes and always with an audience
in mind? Could these perhaps be seen as equivalent to the public letters
Olive Schreiner occasionally wrote, together with thousands of her `familiar
letters'? Certainly, both were part of her shared epistolary construction
of a sensibility and a way of life. And to whom is the particular set of
thoughts in this article addressed? In it, am `I' eliciting a response from
`you' (whoever you are), and to what genre does this way of writing belong?
Also, if my papers survive my death and its aftermath, how might this particular
communication fare among the rest of the things I've written? If someone
should read it a hundred years on, how might they understand it and postulate
my intended readers? Then there is the question of how to sign what I've
written here — `me' signals wrongly that I' am the only intended reader,
but `Liz Stanley' suggests that it is entirely for an unknown other or others,
while `Liz' inappropriately indicates familiar knowledge of its readers,
and there is no word for `both me and you'. But all these matters are very
interesting and I hope other people think so too.
DEAR
READER, SOME OPENING REMARKS ON THE EPISTOLARY FORM1 This article discusses
ideas concerning the following: whether or not letters are a genre of writing; the epistolary practices that their writers and readers engage in; the strategies
and structures that characterize collections of letters; and the place of
the epistolary form among the
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`documents
of life'.2 As Ken Plummer points out, over the last twenty years there has
been `a major cultural boom in life story and auto/ biographical work', including
a large growth in social science interest in life story and life history methods
and narrative approaches.3 He also comments that some `documents of life'
have been seen as prob- lematic and either ignored or treated as marginal,
with diaries receiv- ing scant attention and letters even less.4 Plummer's
observations about the perceived characteristics of letters can perhaps help
explain why: ... many insights can be gained from the study of letters, yet
... social scientists are likely to remain suspicious of their value on a
number of scores ... every letter speaks not just of the writer's world, but
also of the writer's perceptions of the recipient. The kind of story told
shifts with the person who will read it.... A further problem with letters
con- cerns ... the `dross rate'.... Letters are not generally focused enough
to be of analytic interest — they contain far too much material that
strays from the researcher's concern.55 In contrast, the disciplines of history
and literature have had a long-standing interest in letters, although until
relatively recently this has been for the characteristics Plummer disavows
letters having — useful facts, which permit seeing letters as referential
of someone's life and providing `evidence' about events or people. However,
literary studies have subsequently been greatly influenced by poststructuralist
ideas broadly conceived, redirecting attention away from presump- tions (or
disavowals) of facticity and towards the issues surrounding textuality.6 There
have been similar shifts in the social sciences, of which the narrative turn
is one indication, but with significant differ- ences concerning the areas
these ideas have impacted on.77 This article discusses conceptual and theoretical
aspects of `a letter' and `a correspondence' and through this reworks Plummer's
com- ments, for the features of letters he perceives as problems are the very
things I find interesting and deserving sustained attention as analyti- cal
problematics. First, letters are dialogical. They are not one person writing
or speaking about their life, but a communication or exchange between one
person and another or others. Thus conceptual ideas about the dialogical are
especially pertinent in thinking about the structural properties that develop
around the unfolding com- munication between letter writers and readers, for
an important feature of correspondences, rather than one-off letters, is their
turn- taking and reciprocity.8 Secondly, letters are perspectival. Their `point'
is not that they contain fixed material from one viewpoint, nor that their
content is directly referential, but that their structure
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and
content changes according to the particular recipient and the passing of time.9
Letters fascinatingly take on the perspective of the `moment' as this develops
within a letter or a sequence of letters, and may utilize a particular `voice'
adopted by the writer or a parti- cular `tone' rhetorically employed, such
as humorous extravagance, strict formality or a particular `persona' playfully
adopted.10 And thirdly, letters have strongly emergent properties. They are
not occasioned, structured or their content filled by researcher-determ- ined
concerns. Instead, they have their own preoccupations and con- ventions and
indeed their own epistolary ethics; and these aspects are likely to change
according to particular correspondences and their development over time. These
three features of letters are interesting and analytically engaging not least
because they are dimensions of all social interac- tion. They are not, however,
defining characteristics of `a letter' or `a correspondence' as a supposedly
distinct genre. Definitional com- ponents and whether the epistolary form
is a separate genre are not a focus for discussion herein.11 This is not to
imply that definitional questions do not have considerable analytical interest,
and certainly contemplating them is essential as a starting point. It is,
however, to propose that all writing genres contain internal distinctions,
exist on a spectrum from the most to the least like the genre `norm', and
are characterized by their intertextuality, all of which suggests that remaining
within the framework of genre conventions can be unnecessarily limiting.12
I NEED TO TELL YOU: SOME ASPECTS OF EDITING OLIVE SCHREINER'S LETTERS My work
in progress concerns some thousands of unpublished archived letters by Olive
Schreiner written between 1889 and her death in 1920 from within an `epistolary
community', or rather a number of overlapping epistolary communities;13 and
it has the aim of publishing a new edition of her letters.14 Reflecting upon
this edi- torial work throws into relief important matters concerning collec-
tions of letters in general which can usefully be sketched out here. In Schreiner's
case, referring to `a collection' of her letters is a mis- nomer, or rather
refers to the product of editorial activity rather than her letters as such.
These letters are deposited in a large number of archive locations, because
of the vagaries of time and the workings of the market in selling and buying
such memorabilia, although the explicit intentions of a few of Schreiner's
correspondents or their heirs have been involved.15 As a result, not only
editorial work with
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publication
in mind, but also reading across the archival sources and the published editions
that currently exist, involves creating `a collec- tion' out of something — `the remaining Olive Schreiner letters' — actually characterized by
its fragmentary and dispersed character.166 This is in fact more like the
(many more) letters originally written and sent by Schreiner, for these were
of course dispersed across time and space and between different people and
intended to be read as one-off letters to them, not as `a correspondence'
in its entirety and even less as `an epistolarium', the entirety of someone's
epistolary endeavour. Relatedly, there is a complex and now largely unknowable
relation- ship between Schreiner's letters that survive and those that have
not, many of which were deliberately destroyed. Crucial information — like the overall shape (number and names of her correspondents), relative
density (of letters per correspondent), temporal coverage (dis- tribution
of letters to her correspondents over time), and these matters concerning
their letters to her — are now unrecoverable. Moreover, there are complex
ethical issues surrounding using, as well as publishing, the surviving letters,
because Schreiner requested their return from her correspondents and was both
directly and indirectly responsible for burning them en masse, and most likely
would have overseen or wanted her heirs to oversee destroying the rest.177
Indicating something about `an epistolarium' both is and is not analytically
important. When starting work on the Schreiner letters, I also commenced constructing
a database of all letters that survived, on the premise that this, together
with some fairly detailed clues18 about the shape and density, if not temporal
coverage, of much of those destroyed, would enable the boundaries of the Schreiner
episto- larium to be marked and some generalizations about the whole per-
mitted. But this now seems to me flawed in an epistemological sense, because
it is so `out of sync' with the fragmentary nature of the epis- tolarium as
such, with the database's realistic function being to show what is archived
where.19 Overall, what remains adds up to a `some- thing' that in Schreiner's
case, like most other letter writers, is not the epistolarium in the full
sense, but simply what remains. Even if an epistolarium in this sense exists
and has been archived, its dimensions are unlikely to have been fully realized
by the writer and certainly not by their individual correspondents, and also
it would be different in kind from the quintessentially fragmentary and dispersed
nature of letter writing and receiving. However, the paradox remains: while
letter writing is characterized by fragmentation and dispersal, none- theless
understanding the remaining fragments requires some kind of overview; and
this constitutes an albeit provisional attempt to
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comprehend
an entirety that never actually existed in the form of `a whole' or `a collection'.
There are always issues involved in choosing which letters to include in a
published collection, for the selection of some letters entails the deselection
of many more.20 Schreiner, for instance, wrote around 12—15,000 letters; and while `only' 5,000 or so are now archived, it is unlikely that the totality
of these could be published, so choices have to be made.21 The two existing
general collections are (differently) problematic, and so one possibility
would have been to provide a new `whole life' edition of letters selected
across Schreiner's life. However, for all its problems, there is a collection
covering the years up to the end of 1899, so another possibility was to cover
the period from then to Schreiner's death in 1920. However, my edition of
Schreiner's letters is planned to start in 1889, when, aged 34 and already
famous, she returned to South Africa from Eur- ope, because this was clearly
a watershed, an epiphany, and one which she not only wrote about in her letters
at the time but which also changed her use of the epistolary form itself.22
This provides a clear rationale for structuring the collection and also for
a prelimi- nary selection of letters; and while many letters and a significant
per- iod of Schreiner's life occurred earlier, it retains the possibility
of another collection at some future point in time, focused on her letters
pre-1889. These issues concerning selection are not about `are these interest-
ing letters or not'23 — or rather, even this can be highly consequential
for readers. In the past Schreiner's letters were subject to a style of editing
which excised passages because deemed `uninteresting', in some cases reducing
letters to single lines or a few sentences, in more of them excising what
the editor judged to be `mundane' and `unim- portant', with the result highly
significant for how Schreiner is pre- sented as a woman, a writer and a public
figure.24 More common is the editorial activity of (usually) `silently correcting'
mistakes and omissions, standardizing spellings, replacing shorthand forms
and otherwise intervening to produce a standard published text. In Schrei-
ner's case, in a large number of instances this has changed the meaning of
what she wrote in significant ways, in at least some instances inverting the
meaning as she wrote it.25 In general, the intention of such editorial interventions
has been (presumably) to do credit to the writerly skills of the letter writer
and to produce a published version thought to better represent them than the
`flawed' epistolary originals. But the result actually misrepresents someone's
letters, with attendant consequences for understanding them as a person.
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Important
though these things are, two features of Schreiner's let- ters have editorially
exercised me more.26 At a seemingly mundane level, the first concerns what
transcriptions should `look like' on the printed page. Schreiner repeatedly,
indeed typically, utilized space on the letter page in a distinctive way.27
Thus her letters can have multiple `ends', one at or near the bottom of its
last sheet, another at the end of the PS or a continuation on another sheet,
and a per- haps final one down the sides of the first page. Some of these
may have signatures, others not; occasionally an ending, or at least an additional
piece of writing, may appear on a separate sheet or the envelope. However,
even transcribed in the order Schreiner is likely to have written them, this
still produces a different sense of meaning and thought-processes from seeing
the original manuscript letters; and in turn, this has consequences for how
her letters like and unlike this are read in relation to each other. The second
involves Schreiner's handwriting, which is notoriously difficult to read.
But while this is a truism, it is not always true to the same extent and on
some epistolary occasions it is not true at all. These variations are more
than happen- stance and largely derive from the material circumstances of
Schreiner's letter writing: her handwriting is most difficult to read when
sprawling and seemingly wild; and while this was often because she wrote while
semi-recumbent due to her asthma, it was also because she typically wrote
letters in batches in snatched periods of time and did so `at full pelt'.
There are, however, some letters where, from specific content or hints, or
the visible pressure of Schreiner's pen in writing, there are indications
of emotion strongly felt. Whether and how to attempt to represent these matters
in transcription raises practical issues; one is the extent to which it is
possible to transcribe such things; the other is that as an editor I became
aware of what these `added up to' only when my research was already underway,
and I had passed over various examples without realizing their import and
so had neither attempted to represent them in transcrip- tions nor recorded
their existence.28 Certainly, recent styles of editing seek to reproduce as
many fea- tures of manuscript originals of letters as possible, including
mis- takes, insertions and crossings out, emphases and super-emphases and
so on, because these are at least potentially important in interpretation
and understanding.29 I have considerable sympathy with this and have moved
closer to it over the period of working on Schreiner's letters. However, two
notes of caution need sounding. First, if the aim is to represent individual
letters with total verisimili- tude, rather than provide an editorial interpretation
of either the whole or of currents within a correspondence, then why not make
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use
of computer technologies, scanning equipment and DVDs to reproduce and make
available the originals?30 A Borgesian world of an archive coterminous with
life itself looms, with significant implications for epistolary scholarship.
Secondly, the editorial com- panion of complete transcription is an equally
complete approach to contextualizing, repairing the epistolary gaps, silences
and ellipses for present-day readers. In effect, this de-temporalizes and
de-histor- icizes letters, thereby `removing' some of the things that characterize
the epistolary form. Regarding Schreiner's letters, there are attrac- tions
here because the editor's view of meaning prevails, but the extent of this
interpretational work begs serious scholarly questions, resulting in my `light
touch' editorial approach, providing such infor- mation only when important
for understanding a letter or series of them. YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN:
SOME RESULTING THOUGHTS ABOUT THE EPISTOLARY FORM Fundamentally, a letter
is a material document of some kind (paper, words on a screen or taking other
forms31) that signals its epistolary purpose through its form or structure
by being addressed to one per- son and signed by another (Dear A, Yours Z'),
although neither the signatory (or writer) nor the addressee (or reader) need
necessarily be singular.32 A letter originates from an `I' (or a number of
them) who signs the letter and in doing so guarantees its authenticity, in
the sense of the writer being the source of this epistolary document.33 A
letter, then, is that which signals an `epistolary intent', and the epistolary
or letter form can be easily recognized and distinguished from other kinds
of writing, because of existing in a social context with shared and largely
stable conventions governing its form. However, the con- vention that a letter
is dated is precisely that, a feature that changes culturally and historically.34
`Open letters' published in books or newspapers/magazines occupy a space between
being `public' writings and `private' letters, with interesting examples provided
by those published within a feminist political frame.35 Like the biblical
New Testament Epistles, open let- ters are usually didactic, written by someone
with a high status if not a pre-eminent position in relation to a particular
community, with the community collectively being addressed.36 Open letters
trade on values and meanings shared in common; but although having com- municative
purpose, they are not directly responded to because they are pronouncements
to be read but not to be answered by writing back. `Letters to the editor'
of newspapers have similar but also
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dissimilar
characteristics, being written by diverse individuals, few if any of whom
will know each other or the newspaper editor con- cerned; and while in a formal
sense such letters are addressed to an editor, a real individual, they are
actually addressed to `the public', to a collectivity of addressees. Newspaper
letter pages also frequently witness an emergent collectivity of correspondents
concerned with particular topics: through their letters, members of the public
join (or help construct) a community of utterance by using this public medium
for expressing private but presumptively interpersonally shared views. Letters
are always `in the present tense', not literally in terms of verb tenses but
by being written at a particular point in time which influences their content,
even if not explicitly. Letters are strongly marked by their quotidian present.
At the same time, all letters are `dead letters' that in a sense never arrive:
the letter that was written and sent is rather different from the one that
arrives and is read because changed by its travels in time and space, from
the there and then of writing to the here and now of reading.37 Letters also
do things with and to time: when a letter is read, its reader of course knows
that time has passed and the `moment' of its writing has gone; but at the
same time, the present tense of the letter recurs — or rather occurs — not only in its first reading but subsequent ones too. Letters thereby share
some of the temporal complexities of photographs: they not only hold memory
but also always represent the moment of their production, and have a similar
`flies in amber' quality. This `present tense' aspect of a letter persists — the self that writes is in a sense always writing, even after the death of
the writer and addressee; and their addressee is `always listening' too.38
An interesting example is provided by penfriend letters written to and from
prisoners on death row in US prisons in the 1990s.39 These were, almost by
defi- nition, time-limited correspondences between strangers who became epistolary
friends. Even more than other letters, they constitute a theatre for the construction
and performance of self in which the dis- tance of time, space and the absence
of face-to-face contact enables rather than disables communication between
the penfriends. When a relationship is confined to the epistolary, everything
that needs to be known is presented within such exchanges, sometimes in response
to inquiries from the other party, but often through describing the broader
context in which more specific material is presented. Herein, there is no
wider or pre-existing interpersonal context of things known in common that
can be drawn on, so textuality is all.40 The temporal slipperiness of the
epistolary connects with its char- acteristics of metonymy and a simulcrum
of presence.41 Metonymy
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involves
substituting an attribute or characteristic for the whole or entirety, referring
here to how letters seemingly take on some of the qualities or characteristics
of the writer; they involve a simu- lacrum of presence by `standing for' or
conjuring up the writer: their characteristic phrases or mistakes, their hand
having folded the paper and sealed the envelope, or their coffee stains marking
the page, all referentially signal `that person'. A letter exists because
of the absence of the writer and the distance (literal or figurative) between
them and the addressee; but the materiality and meaning of letters also conjure
up something of the being of the writer. And in doing so, letters have similar
effects concerning the relationship between the correspon- dents — they
signify the relationship itself.42 Indeed, they often do so in ways that are
more than symbolic (by being an exchange between them) or descriptive (by
evoking times and places shared), because correspondents also often incorporate
words and phrases in letters sent to them with their replies. Letters disturb
binary distinctions: between speaking and writing and private and public,
as well as between here and there, now and then, and presence and absence.
They are conversation-like but not actually conversations; and while they
involve turn taking, these exchanges have a relatively fixed form that talk
does not. Letters tra- verse private and public, having the qualities of both
and occupying a `middle space' in which `private' letters may be both written
and read in public situations.43 And another breach of the public/private
dis- tinction occurs with regard to formal letters, because while these are
written and intended as private to the transaction involved, it is com- mon
knowledge that other people (secretaries, administrators) may read them and
indeed be involved in writing the reply, although signed by the original addressee.44
Thus in 1914, Olive Schreiner wrote to Lloyd George as British Prime Minister,
protesting the out- break of war and requesting a private meeting; her letter
was opened by his secretary (and lover) Frances Stevenson, with his reply
in agreement coming from and signed by Stevenson; and while the meet- ing
was in camera between him and Schreiner, it was also described in letters
from Schreiner to her brother Will, who was shortly to become the South African
Commissioner in London. The relationship between `a letter' and `a correspondence'
is on one level simple, with the latter consisting of a series of letters
in which the parties involved take turns in being writer/signatory and addressee/reader.
A correspondence is an exchange persisting over time, while a letter can be
written, sent and read as a one-off occur- rence.45 However, not all exchanges
of letters are `correspondences' and there may be no intention that these
should persist once the
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purpose
of the exchange is completed (thus, for instance, my exchanges with the UK's
Inland Revenue). Nonetheless, what may start out as merely exchanges of letters
can become a correspondence without prior intent on either side, with an interesting
example being the semi-fictional letters between Helene Hanff and bookshop
man- ager Frank Doel in 84 Charing Cross Road.46 Conversely, once lively correspondences
can dwindle into perfunctory exchanges. Some correspondences are characterized
by being formulated in the interlocutionary voice, a quality frequently noted
about Madame de Sévigné's letters to her married daughter Madame de Grignan; while the correspondence between Ellen Terry and George Bernard Shaw, and
the love letters between Sybil Thorndyke's parents, have a similar questioning
tone to them.47 Correspondences also typically exist in parallel with, rather
than being an extension or echo of, a face-to-face relationship. And while
suggesting that a correspondence has `a life of its own' is too strong a claim,
apart from in exceptional circumstances where a relationship is confined to
the epistolary, letter exchanges can express an important dimension absent
from face-to-face encounters. Thus Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville- West,
for instance, often wrote each other letters even though living in the same
house.48 In addition, the epistolary domain of a corre- spondence develops
its own conventions and ethical dimensions over time, and while a correspondence
involves reciprocity in writing and reading letters, this need not necessarily
be equal.49 A usually impor- tant aspect of this concerns reciprocity in the
exchanges, particularly regarding temporal delays; thus, for example, in the
later correspon- dence of Emerson and Carlyle there are increasingly long
intervals between letters, literally `papered over' in the eventual replies.50
Cor- respondences also involve an `I' and `You' (whether singular or plural)
and are strongly relational in their structuring, and over the time a correspondence
persists an epistolary ethics will, usually tacitly, emerge. Most published
collections of letters, indeed most archived letters, will have originated
as part of a correspondence, but with one side remaining: because of the presumed
importance of one of the letter writers (because a public figure or having
personal significance for either the addressee or the person who kept the
letters); or per- haps because of the content of these letters (such as concerning
a momentous time in someone's life, or the circumstances of writing, for example,
wartime or emigration). In all cases, the loss of the `other side' of the
correspondence influences readers' understandings of the remaining letters,
for these were a part of something, and not the whole. However, the `other
side' is not always seen as interesting
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or
adding anything — a `great letter-writer' and `great letters' effect
is sometimes at work. For instance, Keats's letters are described as great
letters, particularly but not exclusively because so much of them are about
poetry; but if those to him by his brothers George and Tom or by Fanny Brawne
had survived/been published, even though `ordinary letters', these would have
immeasurably increased under- standing of Keats himself. Indeed, the importance
of some correspon- dences is precisely that they are composed entirely by
`ordinary letters'.51 Having sketched out some basic characteristics of a
letter and a correspondence, I now look in more detail at the dialogical,
perspec- tival and emergent features of the epistolary form. FOR YOUR FURTHER
INTEREST: CONCERNING THE DIALOGICAL ASPECTS OF LETTERS As indicated earlier,
until relatively recently letters have been used mainly as a resource and
treated as referential of a person's life and its historical and relational
context, with the focus on content and its recording of factual information.
Thus, for example, Cronwright-Schreiner's main interest in Olive Schreiner's
letters in 1924 was to `prove' his interpretation of her character and conduct,
editing them to demonstrate this. However, over the last two decades or so,
the emphasis has been on the performative, textual and rhetori- cal aspects
of letters, and that they inscribe `a world', emanate from a particular epistolary
community, and have their own characteristic features. Here Draznin's 1992
edition of Schreiner's complete corre- spondence with Havelock Ellis is, in
contrast with Cronwright- Schreiner's edition, concerned to show developments
and changes in the epistolary relationship as fully and transparently as possible.
For my part, editorial aims include not only textual scrupulousness and editorial
transparency, but also wanting to indicate that Schreiner's letters have both
a distinctive `tone' or rhetorical voice and at the same time are tailored
for particular correspondents (as contemplating all the letters written on
any particular day demon- strates).52 As part of the increased concern with
textuality, greater attention has also been given to the ways that letters
in a correspon- dence construct, not just reflect, a relationship, develop
a discourse for articulating this, and can have a complex relationship to
the strictly referential. Thus, for instance, there are issues in interpreting
the emotional dynamics of Schreiner's actual relationship with Mary Sauer,
in spite (or because) of the more than 130 and often lengthy extant letters
that Schreiner sent to her: was this an emotional
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friendship?
Could it have been a sexual relationship? Could it have become sexual but
with Schreiner retreating? Or something else entirely? The letters are often
passionate, seductive — but this does not necessarily mean their face-to-face
encounters were like this. The `textual turn' is very much to be welcomed
for freeing up work on the epistolary form from a `repositories of facts and
if not then deficient' way of thinking about letters and correspondences.
How- ever, at the same time as their textuality, letters also have an `obsti-
nate referentiality',53 their engagement with the `actual course of things',54
for letters do not exist in a textual vacuum. An important aspect here is
that letters are predicated on the existence of a com- munity of utterance
not confined to the correspondents, nor of them plus other people in the contexts
of writing and reading, but involve a social world known in common that is
not delineated in detail and largely taken for granted.55 Thus letter writing
is located in actual things: letters written will include messages passed
on by third parties; they are written at a desk or a table in a room, perhaps
with other people present; using paper and pens or computers of particular
style and cost; they are delivered by a postal service or alternative means;56
they are read in a specific time and place; other people may be present during
this; and a letter's content in whole or part may be conveyed to them. Letters
are also, perhaps prototypically, about actual things as well: daily life; the past, present and future of the relationship between the writer and addressee; familiar and public events; people known in common; and so on. Such things
have a material, social, temporal and spatial reality, and they are `real
in their consequences', including their impact on the epistolary exchange.57
What is required, consequently, is an analytic approach that is fully responsive
to the epistemological, conceptual and theoretical issues sketched out earlier
concerning tex- tual matters, and which at the same time recognizes the referentiality
that characterizes letters and pays due attention to the ways this is textually
mediated and maintained over time.58 As well as these broad dialogical characteristics
of letters and cor- respondences, there are more specific aspects worth noting.
Letters, for instance, involve a performance of self by the writer, but one
tem- pered by recognizing that the addressee is not just a mute audience for
this, but also a `(writing) self in waiting'. Letters are also `a gift' from
A to B and vice versa, for the writer and reader roles are interchange- able,
there is the presumption of response, and they involve mutual metonymy in
bestowing a part of one's self to the other person. At the same time as these
relational aspects, letters are also strongly metonymic of the particular
writer, being a kind of proxy for them,
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such
that their letters may not only be carefully kept over long periods of time
(sometimes in difficult circumstances), but also given back as `a set' at
epiphanous moments.59 In addition, many inter- textualities appear in letters,
including cross-references to the writer's and also the reader's previous
letters, elliptical remarks indicating shared knowledge about people, events
and meanings, and also sometimes by using or parodying other genres of writing.
As noted earlier, their strong dialogical features have encouraged seeing
letters as conversations on paper. However, this should be resisted, for while
exchanges of letters share some of the characteris- tics of conversations,
there are also crucial differences and the conver- sation analogy detracts
attention from their distinctively epistolary features. Thus, while there
is turn taking in epistolary exchanges, this always entails temporal and spatial
interruptions between the writing and the reading of a letter; there is no
face work involved; writing is actually different from speaking; and anyway
the content of each `turn' takes a relatively stable form and is not nearly
so available for ongoing qualification and revision as talk.60 There are also
ways in which letters are definitely a very writerly form of communication.
In their manuscript originals they are clearly a form in flight — they
contain mistakes, crossings out, there are intimations of things there is
no time or space to include, other responsibilities which make demands on
the writer's time, as well as unconventional ways of fill- ing the writing
space, characteristic forms of punctuation (or its absence), distinctive turns
of phrase, and particular forms of address or signature. As well as temporal
and spatial interruptions helping to character- ize the epistolary form, in
a more profound way these interruptions impact on letters to the extent they
are `always unfinished', in a num- ber of senses. Any particular letter is
part of a sequence in a corre- spondence; consequently, there are always things
not present in any one letter, with an incremental and fragmented emplotment
existing across a series concerning what happened before. These `gaps' con-
cern things that need not be written and can be assumed, concerning contextual
and cultural knowledge, about relationships and shared events, leading to
letters that are often highly elliptical, with few or no clues even in a collection
as to the meaning or import of important matters. This includes, for example,
in correspondences involving women factory workers in Lowell and their kin
in Farm to factory, what relationship some people had to each other and what
they did for a living.61 Thus the temptation for editors to fill such `gaps'
on the grounds that readers will want to know and editors should provide this
as part of their expertise. However, as commented
214
earlier,
`finishing' letters like this betrays the fundamentally unfinished nature
of the fragmented epistolary form. Letters (almost) always presume a response,
and an `after' as well as a `before' is ordinarily taken into account in an
epistolary exchange.62 While their then/there and now/here references and
metonymic features reify presence around a simulacrum of the writer, the paradox
is that this is produced only by the person's actual absence. Indeed, paradox
is at the heart of epistolary matters: the `real' message of letters is not
quite what is written; letters `stand for' the writer, but only in their absence; the writer is not the `actual person' but an epistolary version or emanation
of them; what they write about is not the world as it is but that which is
represented; and the moment of writing is conveyed to the reader but only
after it has gone by. ALSO REGARDING THEIR PERSPECTIVAL ASPECTS All exchanges
of letters involve the textual construction and mainte- nance of a distinctive
`world', one with internal defining features, consistencies and typical inconsistencies,
characteristic modes of expression and things known in common that need not
be written about. This is more obviously so regarding a long-term sustained
cor- respondence between two (or more) people; however, it can also char-
acterize the epistolary output of the writer of many letters to a large number
of people, even if none of these involves a sustained corre- spondence. Regarding
Schreiner's letters, although there are some significant differences in the
form as well as content of letters to dif- ferent correspondents, there are
also patterns of just these kinds. For instance, although Schreiner uses `I'
in her letters, she does so in ways that collectivize this by removing it
from the personal realm of emotions and confidences to that of public concerns
shared with her habitual correspondents, shifting into `we' usages; and in
fact it is her occasional use of the apparently removed and general form of
`one' that actually signals emotional or other intensities of feeling. An
economy of exchange and reciprocity is involved in long-term epistolary exchanges,
with mutuality built in and giving rise to a pro- cessual dynamics in which
there are distinctive (to the particular cor- respondence) interpretations
of time and its passing (`by the time you receive this, I will ...') and space
and its separations (here I am ... there you are ...'). This dynamism induces
correspondents to write even when `there's nothing to write about', a marked
feature of some of Schreiner's long-term correspondences, including with her
mother
215
and
close friend Betty Molteno, although interestingly not with others she was
close to, like her brother Will and sister-in-law Fan, indicating perhaps
degrees of closeness, perhaps more subtle distinc- tions concerning who could
be taken for granted.63 Frequently such dynamics are self-sustaining, although
there are likely to be changes over time to the form as well as content of
epistolary exchanges. Thus the Henry Adams and Thomas Carlyle correspondence,
for instance, changed considerably over the years that their epistolary friendship
existed, with the temporal spaces between letters increasing mark- edly.64
A Schreiner example here concerns her correspondence with Molteno, which changed
dramatically after the death of Molteno's partner and Schreiner's close friend
Alice Greene.65 Another involves her correspondence with Mary Sauer, which
was very intensive in the initial years of their friendship, continued in
a lower key, and then in effect terminated around a political breach, never
explicitly addressed, around Sauer's support for her politician husband's
part in developing discriminatory `race' legislation. The perspectival dimensions
of epistolary matters importantly include the relationship between the epistolary
`world' and its exchanges, and wider social life and its interpersonal dynamics.
For inveterate letter writers, their letter writing takes place within a com-
munity of correspondents that can involve, for instance, family mem- bers
living at a distance,66 friends living in different places, correspondents
who have never or rarely been met face to face; and it gives rise to a collective
`We', as well as an `I' and a `You', including by encompassing a number of
letter writers who are epistolarily con- nected with more than one member
of the network. For instance, the `Five of Hearts' epistolary circle that
included Henry Adams had a strong collective sense of this kind, and most
of its members were part of other epistolary circles too.67 The letters to
and by women working in Lowell (USA) factories between the 1830s and 1860s
provide an interesting contrast.68 These trade on knowledge about the social
world shared in common between the correspondents and are strongly relational
in character; consequently, they are often highly elliptical, opaque to present-day
readers because they contain content that would have been known at the time
but seems mysterious nearly 200 years on. Among other things, this suggests
that letters do differ- ent jobs of communicative work and that not all `good
letters', as recipients perceive this, are necessarily tailored to the interests
and concerns of the recipients: these particular letters concern the writer
and family events, conveyed to the addressee and through them a wider family
network; and that they were kept safely over a long per- iod of time suggests
they were highly valued.
216
Concerning
Olive Schreiner's correspondences, although these involved people who were
interconnected and various of whom con- ducted extensive correspondences themselves,
there is little sense from what survives of a shared collective `we' as compared
with the `five of hearts' epistolary circle. However, a more tacit form of
this involved a sub-set of her correspondents. Schreiner was linked with Betty
Molteno, Alice Greene, Will and Fan Schreiner, Eleanor Marx, Edward Carpenter,
Anna Purcell and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, for instance, but not various
others in her epistolary circle, through their feminist, socialist and anti-imperialist
convictions.69 These exchanges involved not only passing on news and keeping
in touch, but the construction of a sensibility that was ethical as much as
political, concerning the nature of the ethically `good life' and the proper
relationship between these people's personal conduct and public events. There
is also an important material aspect to the perspectival dimensions of epistolary
exchanges. The epistolary form has been and continues to be shaped by the
socio-economic order and chan- ging communication technologies, not least
because such develop- ments also include those (like income, time, transportation
systems) that facilitate or inhibit face-to-face contact.70 The impact on
the epistolary form of postal services, the laying of telegraph wires, devel-
opment of telecommunications and other forms of distance com- munication,
and computer technology and digital cameras and webcams as well as email,
has been widely recognized as extremely consequential, even if not yet explored
in any depth with regard to particular correspondences over time.71 Schreiner,
born in 1855, belonged to a generation for whom telegrams were a `last resort'
in times of urgency, and the telephone had little impact on their modes of
communication. More important changes for them concerned how quickly letters
moved around within South Africa, with the ox wagon giving way to horse transport
and then the railway, and how quickly they were delivered to people in another
continent, with increasingly swift and reliable steam shipping. These things
helped change people's experience of time and impacted on their understanding
of and feelings about physical separation and sense of distance. Thus, for
example, in the 1870s when, one after the other, the small children of one
of Schreiner's older sisters died, she was only able to write loving letters
of condolence well after these sad events; but in 1912 when her sister Ettie
was dying, Schreiner not only wrote weekly and sometimes daily letters to
her but also, receiving a telegram about Ettie's death, was able to reach
Cape Town in time for her funeral.
217
AND
THE EMERGENT PROPERTIES OF LETTERS Thus far discussion may seem to have presumed
that the features commented on mark out the epistolary as a distinct genre
of writing. Against this, it should be emphasized that letter writing and
corre- spondences involve a theatre of usage, for although there are indeed
conventions about the form that letters take, these provide a loose shape
rather than being determining, and the letter-writing practices that result
are performative and emergent and often play with `other' genres or indeed
shade into these.72 In relation to Schreiner's corre- spondences, it is not
so much that these are part of a genre of letter writing shared with other
letter writers across cultural differences and historical divisions, as it
is that they have personally characteristic features: her letters could have
been written by no one else, providing the distinctiveness of the Schreiner
epistolarium. However, these things are discernible in a sense only `at the
end'; they were not invariant properties of her letters from the very first,
but rather developed over time and in response to circumstances and events
in the wider context as well as `the epistolary world' within her correspondences.
There is certainly an historically fairly stable genre object, `the let- ter',
with specific recognizable rhetorical features, including a salu- tation to
an addressee, greetings and excuses, other usually descriptive content, closing
material, a closure, and a signature. `The letter' is a public and known form
and all the examples referred to herein are recognizably `the same kind' of
thing, even though writ- ten sometimes hundreds of years apart, on different
continents, by people of different class, gender and `race' backgrounds, and
in very different personal and political contexts.73 However, these conven-
tions provide a shape, rather than hard and fast requirements,74 and adherence
to the rhetorical conventions can be combined with features typical of the
writer and/or the correspondence, specific and characteristic usages, and
with significant differences in content and practice evolving over time. Here
the importance of letter-writing practices needs to be acknowledged and that
these are indeed emerg- ent, relational and change over time. The conventions,
then, are best understood as providing a flexible space or framework within
which form can be subverted by individ- ual practice. This includes reworking
salutations and signatures to amuse, seduce, impress, or offend the recipient,
and by skilled letter writers producing outlaw versions. Moreover, the existence
of con- ventions means that points of potential resistance are built-in at
the juncture; practice is evaluated against these, so that actual letters
218
rarely
reach the rhetorical ideal — they are too long, too short, too late,
not interesting or amusing enough. In addition, the epistolary form is porous
to other kinds of writing, so that, for example, letters can be written in
the form of a phone call or conversation or a job reference; Christmas cards
can be sent in the form of a family or otherwise collective letter; and advertisements
and charitable requests can be personalized and signed as though a familiar
letter. This porous quality is such that the epistolary form has been recog-
nized as the source of various other genres. In Britain, banknotes ori- ginated
as letters promising to `pay the bearer on demand' its worth in gold coinage; patents originated as letters laying claim to originating the object or process
that the letter referred to; and schol- arly articles originated in letters
circulated between members of what became the Royal Society.75 News journals
and newspapers developed out of letters from `our correspondent', as within
the `republic of letters' in eighteenth-century France, and in India by the
`newswriters' acting as tolerated espionage at all Indian courts.76 Also some
organizational records, such as job references, stockholders' reports and
curricula vitae, originated in epistolary ver- sions. In the case of job references,
the increased use of forms for these not withstanding, most are still written
in the form of a letter; stockholders' reports may sometimes lack salutations
and other opening materials but are invariably signed by a chairperson and
accompanied by signed reports from accountants, the signatory thereby guaranteeing
the authenticity of these materials; and while curricula vitae are now highly
formalized, they are usually accompanied by a signed letter of intent.77 DRAWING
TO A CLOSE NOW, WITH THE EPISTOLARIUM The idea of the epistolarium can be
thought about in (at least) three related ways, with rather different epistemological
complexities and consequentialities: as an epistolary record that remains
for post hoc scrutiny; as `a collection' of the entirety of the surviving
correspon- dences that a particular letter writer was involved in; and as
the `ur-letters' produced in transcribing, editing and publishing actual letters
(or rather versions of them). In discussing these, almost everything commented
on here has reverberations for epistolary ethics, which are by no means confined
to the exchanges between letter writers and their addressees but infuse all
aspects of the epistolarium.78 First, on one level an epistolarium is simply
the full number of someone's letters that have become part of the public archival
record,
219
someone's
surviving letters made available for post hoc scrutiny. But even confining
thinking to this level, a question with major analytical reverberations almost
immediately arises: by what means and with what consequences for the nature
of the epistolarium have these (usually) private documents entered the public
domain? For instance, the letters Schreiner wrote to Frederick Pethick-Lawrence
entered the public domain for a Cape Town display during centenary celebra-
tions of her birth in 1955, but only in the form of typescripts, with the
originals destroyed either at the time or later. In addition, it is clear
from the content of these that some letters in the sequence had not been made
available for typing, presumably selected out by Pethick-Lawrence himself.
These are likely to include letters deemed too trivial or mundane to be interesting,
as well as those deemed too contentious regarding events and persons, concerning
either Fred or probably Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence.79 These two evaluations
often underpin selections, and also destructions, of letters held in private
and `familiar' hands: there may be little awareness that the ordinary can
be important and interesting, while reputations may be over- guarded on affective
grounds. Where archiving is involved, the strategies that have been followed
significantly impact on the shape and also the order of the epistolar- ium.80
These matters circumscribe even if they do not entirely govern how the present-day
reader reads and comprehends — archiving pro- cesses and those of sedementation
within archive collections are often hidden but always consequential.81 This
includes what can be known about the relationship between the epistolarium
that now exists and the total epistolary output of a particular letter writer.
In the case of Olive Schreiner, as suggested earlier, it is possible to made
`guessti- mates' about this. However, where entire correspondences have been
destroyed, nothing can be known about, not just their informational content,
but equally or more importantly the characteristic features of these, thereby
inhibiting comprehension of the epistolarium in another sense, that of the
totality of the letters someone wrote and the correspondences they engaged
in. And where little or nothing can be known about such `vanished' correspondences,
then there are important implications for evaluating any claims made about
`the letters' and, even more so, concerning their relationship to `the life'.
Thinking at a more conceptual level about what kind of a record is formed
by an epistolarium, there are important epistemological aspects of the post
hoc public availability of what was originally ad hoc and private.82 Passing
time brings not only temporal disjunc- tures between then and its relevancies
and those of now, but also
220
disjunctures
of knowledge and understanding: there are certainly sig- nificant differences
between what an outsider now looks for in and understands by the letters in
an epistolarium, compared with what their recipients then did, although the
precise dimensions of such dif- ferences are not fully recoverable. A useful
example here concerns William Wordsworth's letters, described even by fans
of his poetry as sometimes prosy and boring. A perhaps apocryphal story is
that Wordsworth wrote them deliberately so to prevent trophy hunters from
selling them, but equally plausibly this was his letter style and people who
knew him well read beneath their surface.83 Another example is that after
1889 Olive Schreiner habitually wrote only letters that engaged with the external
world. This is not to say that `private' dimensions are entirely absent, but
that these are present in particular ways, keeping emotional expressions in
check and never discussing other people's character or conduct. As a consequence,
there are considerable limits to how far it is possible now to under- stand
the epiphanous moments when personal matters are invoked, both for Schreiner
in writing and the recipients in reading these letters. There are additional
epistemological reverberations concerning the epistolarium as `a collection'.
Thus, for instance, should Janet Flanner's New Yorker letters and Schreiner's
open letters to newspa- pers be considered part of the epistolarium? If so,
then in Schreiner's case why not her novels and allegories, because these
too have auto- biographical dimensions? Where is the boundary of the epistolarium
and what kind of definitional apparatus is used in drawing it? An original
correspondence may have had one, two or more contributors in the original
exchanges. Where only one side survives or has been focused on, there are
implications for understanding the whole, leav- ing aside whether the other
letters in the correspondence still exist or the likely impact of these for
comprehending the other (set/s of) let- ters. Thus, reading the letters Vita
Sackville-West wrote to Virginia Woolf,84 Woolf comes into view as more sexual
and seductive; they also suggest how consequential the political differences
revealed around the publication of Three guineas were for the relationship.
There are also important considerations here concerning time. The shape, content
and meaning of letter collections assume different pro- portions when located
temporally and in connection with everything else in the writer's life. Thus
in relation to Schreiner, putting her let- ters to Mary Sauer in the context
of her developing ideas about poli- tics, labour and `race', but also her
to-ing and fro-ing of feelings about whether to marry or not, gives a very
different feeling to them. Similarly, reading Virginia Woolf's letters with
those of Leonard
221
Woolf
across the same periods of time suggests a very grounded and politically enmeshed
pattern to Woolf's life outside, or alongside, her writing.85 Letters, I suggested
earlier, are characterized by temporal and spa- tial interruptions, are always
`unfinished' in the sense of containing gaps, ellipses and mistakes, and also
presume a response and thus an `after'. Collections of letters, however, are
often incomplete in the more ordinary sense of there being things missing
or destroyed, constituting larger or smaller gaps in those originally written.
In addition, `life' goes on beyond the limits of letters, in the social and
relational context from which they emanate and with which they are concerned,
and significant amounts (in both quantitative and eva- luative senses) of
this are not represented (in any sense of the word) in a collection of letters,
let alone individual letters within it. However, what remains is still `a
collection' and provides the record of an indi- vidual (where only one `side'
of a correspondence survives) or a shared epistolary life; and it also constitutes
`a narrative', in two senses. One, it charts the overall trajectory of the
epistolary events — it has a chronological or sequential form (the basic
definition of what a narrative is); and two, what remains provides the only
epistolary narrative that, because of time's passing and vagaries, is now
possible. For Olive Schreiner, although there is little sense that her letters
had any deliberately crafted purpose other than `keeping in touch' and maintaining
relationships, nonetheless an overall narra- tive structure is still discernible.
For all their diversity (of correspon- dents and communicative purposes, and
changes over time in their content and tone), they have three large internal
consistencies: (i) in the concerns articulated, including the importance of
maintaining the relationship, Schreiner's (and usually also the addressee's)
involvement with the external world and its events, political and social injustices
and how best to respond to these, and the everyday; (ii) the means by which
she does this, including taking at least equal responsibility for the epistolary
exchanges and reciprocity in these, and being responsive to each correspondent; and (iii) an emergent ethics about what it is appropriate and seemly for her
letters to contain.866 A third set of epistemological concerns arise concerning
the `ur-letters' produced in transcribing, editing and publishing letters.
Thus, for example, editorial work on Woolf's published letters is largely
transparent and extensively indicated in the text, together with copious notes
on persons and places.87 But the results are in effect translations from manuscript
to a published printed form and are actually alternative (or even competing)
versions from the originals,
222
produced
by editorial activity that cannot be completely fully indicated.88 A considerable
amount of editorial activity goes into transcribing and presenting a set of
letters for publication even when — indeed, especially when — the intention is to be as faithful to the originals as possible. However,
such things as the kind of envel- ope and how it is addressed, the writing
paper used, how the letter looks on the page, handwriting and its indications
of circumstance of writing or mood, cannot be transcribed. And while mistakes,
exci- sions and insertions can certainly be indicated in transcribing practices,
publishers often see these as unnecessarily cluttering a text and prevent-
ing a wider readership, unless the letters involved are by someone recognized
as `significant' and therefore likely to sell regardless. Also many editors,
unlike the editors of Woolf's letters, carry out the `silent corrections'
indicated earlier, producing a more standardized and uni- form epistolary
version than exists in the originals. The epistemological consequences of
the ur-letters produced by editorial work are compounded when the results
are considered together, that is, within a published collection. As noted
earlier, only rarely can all surviving letters be published, and therefore
decisions have to be made about what is selected and deselected.89 And while
in general shortening individual letters to remove what is `boring' or `irrelevant'
is now considered bad practice, some editors still do so to give a particular
interpretation through their selections.90 The more usual editorial strategy,
as with the shorter Elizabeth Gaskell letters subtitled `a portrait in letters'
and described as `a biography largely in her own words', is one of selecting
whole letters, in this instance suggesting an interesting relationship between
the selection and the epistolarium in providing insights into Gaskell's life.91
The result of the various activities involved in publishing a collec- tion
of letters is to produce a kind of palimpsest: the original letters are there,
but in shadowy half-erased form and having an ambiguous relationship with
their transcribed and printed versions. These are not quite the same as the
manuscripts but not entirely different either.92 There seems no way out of
this unless the entire epistolarium is pub- lished in camera form. However,
in addition to constraining every reader to be their own researcher (and editor),
this would still not dis- solve time and the fact that the social world and
the `actual course of things', of which the epistolary exchange is but one
representational version, has gone and there is no way it can be resurrected
`as it was' for present-day consumption. My own preference is to make editorial
activity as transparent as possible, for reasons connected with the arguments
sketched out above, and because this makes apparent to
223
readers
that the project is one of editorial translation and interpret- ation rather
than resurrection. YOURS SINCERELY, ABOUT TWO MATTERS, WITH A SIGNATURE Collections
of letters have had a bad press, to an extent because of the later nineteenth-century
tradition of publishing the `life and letters of a great man', perhaps prototypically
represented by Charles Kingsley.93 These beg hefty questions about what was
the then- presumption of a straightforwardly referential relationship between
letters and lives. Such questions have been asked insistently over the last
decade or so, perhaps to the point where it is now necessary to emphasize
that, however troublesome and ambiguous it is, there is indeed a connection
between lives actually lived and the letters writ- ten thereof. Letters are
written by a living person located in a material and social context, and their
correspondence involves other people similarly located.94 And sometimes loosely
but often very directly, let- ters and correspondences describe or invoke
aspects of this context and the place of these people within it. It is important
to emphasize this, along with giving due appreciation to their textual and
rhetorical features, for ultimately letters matter because they are connected
with real lives. The letters of the famous and not so famous are published
and analytically scrutinized because they are `letters from the life'; and
it is this life and its accomplishments, implied in the letter writer's signature,
which gives importance and interest to them.95 This is by no means to lose
sight of the textual and rhetorical dimensions of letters and to re-submerge
these within an approach that pillages letters for `facts about the life'
and perceives importance only insofar as they serve this purpose. While in
the past this has been the main basis for a social science interest in letters,
social scientists interested in `the documents of life' need now to rethink
the value of the epistolary form. Letters are not only a neglected source
but also a deeply fascinating kind of writing, still one of the most preva-
lent of life writings, and among its other fascinations the epistolary form
combines the textual and the referential and frequently acts as a barometer
of social changes impacting on the interpersonal dynam- ics of epistolary
and other relationships.96 As an editor and analyst of letters, the importance
of the epistolary form for me lies in the fact that letters are a form in
flight. They do not contain evidence of `the real person', but are rather
traces of this person in a particular representational epistolary guise and
as expressed at successive points in time and to a variety of people; and
all these features of letters are conceptually and analytically
224
fascinating.
As someone with a strong interest in `the life', letters can be refracted
back and forth across other representational versions of `a life', in photographs,
diaries, autobiographies, memoirs and biographies (including those of other
people and not just the parti- cular letter writer), thereby piecing together
a kaleidoscopic image of them.97 And as a reader of letters, their interest
and enjoyment for me lies especially in the witness that letters give to the
emergent `voice' of the letter writer, their characteristic turns of phrase
and concerns, their rhetorical style in relation to different correspondents,
and how all these things develop and change over time. P.S. I have referred
extensively to my work in progress on the Olive Schreiner letters. However,
my analytic and readerly interest in the epistolary form is by no means confined
to this and there are three related projects, also ongoing, of relevance to
the present discussion. One involves reading and thinking about published
collections and selections and their relationship to the whole. The second
concerns correspondences between two (or more) people, part of which has been
drawn on herein. The third concerns developments in computer and electronic
communications media, particularly email and text messaging, and their impact
on the epistolary form conceived broad- ly. About these parallel projects,
I note with some concern that my work on Schreiner's letters spawns side projects
that take over for lengthy periods of time. Indeed, this present discussion
stems from such a side project, concerning how to conceptualize the epistolary
form.
NOTES
1 And, dear anonymous referees,
my thanks to you for helpful comments.
2 These are the naturally
occurring forms of life writing, or rather life representing because they
include more than just written texts. Writing on epistolary matters that
has particularly influenced discussion here includes: Altman, 1982; Andrews,
1990; Barton and Hall, 1999; Decker, 1998; Derrida, 1986; Earle, 1999; Gilroy
and Verhoeven, 2000; Goldsmith, 1989; Goodman, 1994; Jacobus, 1986; Jolly,
2001; Kauffman, 1992; MacArthur, 1990; Montefiore and Hallett, 2002; Porter,
1986; Redford, 1986; Thomas and Znaniecki, 1927; Warner, 1990.
3 Plummer, 2001: ix. As
this indicates, I am discussing epistolary matters from a — hopefully
wide-ranging — social science base.
4 Plummer, 2001: 74. Comments
on letters in Roberts's (2002: 62—63) introductory text are similarly
perfunctory; indeed discussion of all naturally occurring life writings gets
only half a dozen pages. Interestingly, while 225
Biography contains
articles and reviews concerning most forms of life writings, a ten year (1994
to end 2003, volumes 17 to 26) scan reveals little in the way of work on
or extensively using letters. Similarly, overviewing Auto/Biography from
its first issue as a BSA Study Group newsletter in October 1992 to now reveals
a similar absence. My own interests lie in diaries and letters, and the auto/biographical
form itself.
5 Plummer, 2001: 54—55.
6 See, for example, Jacobus,
1986.
7 My own work is located
at the borders of sociology, literature, philosophy and history; among other
things, Stanley (1992) emphasizes that ideas associated with poststructuralism,
postmodernism and deconstructionism long predate these colonizing developments.
8 This presumes letters are
always sent; however, as Roper (2001) indicates, this is not so.
9 As McDermott (2000) interestingly
shows, following computer analysis of three groups of Emily Dickenson letters.
10 Thus it seems Henry Adams
was awkward `in life', but easy in epistolary incarnation; see Decker (1998,
Chapter 5) for an interesting discussion.
11 See Jolly's (2001) entries
on `Letters: General Survey', `War Letters' and `Women's Letters', which
provide succinct summaries of defining aspects. A caution comes from Goodman
(1988), that restricting the form can prevent seeing experiments for what
they are.
12 I made the same point
in Stanley (1992) and indeed coined the term to challenge genre distinctions.
Ironically, while the term is now widely cited by others, this is as a shorthand
for `biography and autobiography' rather than to dispute such distinctions.
13 On Schreiner and her
writings, see, Stanley 2002a; 2002b; 2002c; 2002d. My grateful thanks to
the ESRC for a Research Fellowship (R000271029) to work on Schreiner's letters,
and the British Academy for travel fund support. Schreiner's first extant
letter dates from the 1860s. In 1889, she returned to South Africa from Europe,
an epiphany for her in a number of respects, importantly including how she
used the epistolary form. These communities centred on her family, her closest
friends from feminist and socialist circles in Britain, and feminists and
political fellow travellers in South Africa.
14 There are three existing
collections. Cronwright-Schreiner (1924b) bowdlerizes by editorial omission
from particular letters, by selecting out whole important letters, indeed
whole correspondences, and also sometimes by creating `a letter' by stitching
together passages from a number of originals then destroyed (some correspondents
kept copies). Rive (1987) focuses on Schreiner's letter writing up to 1899; this also has problems concerning the balance of selections, omission of
entire correspondences, and crucial editorial elisions of, for instance,
Schreiner's feminist and socialist involvements. Draznin's (1992) edition
of the correspondence between Schreiner and Havelock Ellis is exemplary.
15 The main collections
are in several archives in South Africa, with two in the UK and one in the
USA (Stanley, 2002a, has details). Small numbers of her letters are in many
other archives as well.
226
16 As Goldsmith (1989) suggests,
letters always have a fragmentary character. Huff (2000) makes a similar point
about many diaries, although assuming too readily that this referentially
indicates the actual identity of the writer.
17 As a result, such collections
are literally `against her (legal) will'. While all Schreiner scholars, myself
included, have cursed Cronwright-Schreiner's 1922 mass burning of her correspondences,
clearly Schreiner herself would have approved this, and disapproved the edited
collections including his.
18 From some of Schreiner's
letters at the time, and also in Cronwright-Schreiner's diary entries while
writing his biography of Schreiner and compiling The letters (Cronwright-Schreiner,
1924a; 1924b).
19 With a similar strategy
utilized in editing the Kate Field letters, selecting in about half those
extant and providing a detailed chronological list and location for the rest; see Field (1996).
20 Although only a minority
have `selection' in their titles, most are precisely this.
21 Contemplating this for Lewis Carroll (1979; 1982) indicates the radical
break that exists between the epistolarium in the full sense (in his case,
well over 98,000 letters are indicated by his notated letter-books), the
remaining letters (several thousand), and what has been published in the
popularly available selected letters (about 350). While the scale of his epistolary
project is out of the ordinary, the epistemological issues arising from these
disjunctures are general ones.
22 Stanley, 2002b.
23 Brogan's editorial introduction
to Arthur Ransome's (1998) letters indicates that the most important criteria
for his selection was that letters `earn their keep' by containing particularly
interesting content.
24 Thus Brogan's collection
of Ransome (1998) letters involves the editorial use of short extracts from
those seen as otherwise uninteresting but on grounds the reader is not fully
informed about.
25 While this is mainly
Cronwright-Schreiner (1924b), it is not unknown in Rive's 1987 edition.
26 Not because they are
not crucial, but because it has been fairly easy to make decisions about
them.
27 Having worked on other
letters, this seems to me widespread; Huff (2000) also notes it as a common
feature of manuscript diaries, an observation I support from my past research.
28 Neither feature is confined
to Schreiner's letters. Thus, for instance, Arthur Ransome's (1998) drawings
pepper the pages of letters like punctuation and their place on the page
and in the letter is significant; however, apart from some reproduced examples,
these are largely absent from the edited letters.
29 The Mark Twain Letters
project has opted for a `plain text' editorial style, registering all the
fine detail in transcriptions, including envelopes, by using a complex typographical
code referencing such detail; see Clemens, 1988.
30 The archival response
is in general unlikely to support this, or at least not without a high cost
being attached.
31 The transfer from speech
to writing or other representational media is consequential, for it builds
in the expectation that a letter will be reread, as well as read, and that
its form and detail will come under scrutiny in a way that ordinary talk does
not. Thus the `anxiety' about arrival, content, length and so on 227that
Hallett (2002) proposes is fundamental to the form (although I see this as
a function of the particular letters researched by her).
32 But contemplate here Chesler's
(1997) open letters to `a young feminist' or the `Letters from Paris' by
Janet Flanner (a cross between an open letter and an essay) published in
the New Yorker magazine (see Pearl, 2002). Neither presupposes a reply; but
this can be very different regarding letters to the editor of a newspaper,
where often actual responses are published.
33 Thus the possibility of
forgery, as in the so-called `Casket Letters' that provided the justification
for executing Mary Queen of Scots. But (semi-)fictional letters (e.g., Sagan,
1987) do not break this guarantee any more than epistolary novels do, because
the reader is always in on the `secret':
34 Thus in c. AD 100 Roman
Britain, letters to and from Vindolanda inhabitants were not dated at all
(Birley, 1999); in Victorian London with its several posts a day, a day and
time or just a time were fairly common; whereas in the UK now a day, date
and year is more usual.
35 Regarding Chesler (1997),
these open letters are in a way `semi-private' although appearing in the
public realm of a book, because `belonging' to the political community of
US feminists. The `real' public letter herein appears in the Acknowledgements,
addressed by Chesler to various named others; while the `letters' are actually
short themed essays couched in an epistolary form. On letters in the feminist
community, see Jolly, 1995; 2002.
36 Schreiner too published
a number of influential open letters; see Stanley, 2002a.
37 Importantly discussed
by Derrida, 1986.
38 A frequent comment made
about Madame de Sévigné's letters to her married daughter Madame de Grignan,
including by Goldsmith, 1984.
39 An epistolary exchange
participated in as well as researched by Janet Maybin (1999; 2002). This is
perhaps an extreme example, but see also Hanff, 1970.
40 This is not to deny the public knowledge that both `ends' of these pen-friendships
draw on, around imprisonment, class and `race' issues concerning criminal
justice, also ethical convictions concerning the death penalty in the USA; it is rather that these and other emergent features necessarily take place
within the correspondence alone.
41 See Baudrillard, 1981; Stanley, 2000.
42 This is sometimes literally
so. Thus Maybin's (1999; 2003) death row penfriends. In more ordinary terms,
thus with the Schreiner sisters Katie and Alice never seeing their birth
family again after marriage and removal to a different area of South Africa.
43 Stimpson uses the `sociograph'
to characterize the Woolf correspondences, inscribing `social worlds that
she needed and wanted ... an autobiography of the self with others, a citizen/denizen
of relationships' (Stimpson, 1984: 168); clearly, however, the term indicates
a dimension of all correspondences.
44 Thus the c. AD 100 Vindolanda letters were mainly written by scribes
but signed by the addressor, including the earliest letter featuring a woman's
writing (Birley, 1999: 34—36).
45 Stimpson (1984) proposes
that `good' letters and correspondences need to be self-reflexive; this seems
overly narrow restrictive, and class/time specific.
228
46 Hanff, 1970.
47 Madame de Sévigné, 1955; Goldsmith, 1984; St John, 1931; Casson, 1984.
48 Nicholson, 1992.
49 Thus the wartime letters
between my parents, with my non-writing mother's letters mainly consisting
of an envelope and a sheet of notepaper inside with just her name and a (X)
kiss on it.
50 Emerson and Carlyle, 1964.
51 See Thompson, 1987. An
interesting example of `ordinary letters' concerns the recently published
letters and diaries of the contralto Kathleen Ferrier (2003); these may not
change how her singing is viewed, but they certainly suggest something about
the relationship between an extraordinary voice and the otherwise `ordinary'
life of its possessor.
52 Stimpson (1984) sees this
as crucial.
53 I owe the phrase to Monica
Pearl at the `Lives and Letters' Conference at the University of Kent in
autumn 2001.
54 Broughton, 2000.
55 This can be illusionary,
as witnessed by the seismic tremors in the friendship group when Woolf (1937)
published Three guineas.
56 Kell, 1999.
57 Hall, 1999.
58 The Vindolanda letters
provide excellent examples, being immersed in the practical aspects of communicative
exchanges (Birley, 1999).
59 Schreiner destroyed
most of the letters her many correspondents had written to her; however, before
leaving South Africa for Europe in 1913, she returned the letters her sister-in-law
Fan had sent her when engaged to Schreiner's favourite brother Will, because
they signified Fan's `tender self forgetting spirit'.
60 Thus the frequent resistance
of people to interview transcripts: what works and is acceptable as talk
takes on very different qualities when translated to paper.
61 Dublin, 1993.
62 Even fictional collections
generally have this characteristic, as with the fictional letters to Sarah
Bernhardt in the Père Lachaise cemetery (Sagan, 1987). In this respect, an
exception is Emily Dickinson's last letter, written as she was dying, to
her Norcross cousins: `Little Cousins, Called Back. Emily' (quoted in Decker
1998: 173—74). As this letter indicates, there are also `last letters' — in the event of a death, the end of an affair, etcetera.
63 Few letters from Schreiner's
correspondents have survived, so it is not possible to say whether this also
occurred at the other `end' of these exchanges, although the remaining letters
by her mother suggest it did.
64 Emerson and Carlyle,
1964.
65 Molteno, Schreiner's
closest friend over many years, then radically changed the way she lived and
the circles she moved within. This was imposed on Schreiner; she found it
difficult to grasp the extent of the emotional withdrawal involved, in her
very last letters still hoping that Molteno might return to South Africa
and live somewhere near her.
229
66 Or exceptionally, as with
Nicholson and Sackville-West, under the same roof.
67 Adams, 1947.
68 Dublin, 1993. Some of
these correspondences were deliberately initiated and sustained between family
members who had not been previously close before; these are `familiar letters',
but where emotional closeness was of little concern to the correspondents.
69 This is not a matter of
emotional closeness, for Schreiner's letters to her sister Ettie are immensely
loving and affectionate, while she and Ettie did not agree about many political
matters; however, they did about `race' matters and for Schreiner this became
an indication of people's other political views.
70 Henwood et al., 2001 and Kennedy, 2003.
71 Decker, 1998: 229—41; Yates, 1999; and contributors to Zuern, 2003.
72 And vice versa, as with epistolary novels, fictional letters.
73 Is this perhaps an artefact
of Western thinking and its `translation' of what is actually unlike into
`the same, more or less'? The Epistles, with their seventeenth-century translation
into English at a point when the letter form was already fairly stable, should
perhaps be seen in such terms.
74 While model letter books
and published exemplars existed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
and were used by many, it is also clear that, no matter how unaccustomed
to writing people were, their letters both traded on and also departed from
the tacit rules; see Austin's (1999) fascinating discussion of letter writing
in a Cornish community in the 1790s.
75 Bazerman, 1999.
76 See Goodman (1994) and
Bayly (1996) respectively for some interesting and contentious takes on this.
77 Resignations almost
invariably take the form of a signed letter. As Decker (1998) suggests, while
electronic records are replacing many of the things letters were formerly
used for, there are legal or other formal circumstances in which only a paper
record with an addressee and a signatory will do.
78 For an interesting discussion
of emergent epistolary ethics in the context of emigration, see Gerber, 2000.
79 As Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence
was dead when the typescripts were made, this was not by her. Stanley (2002d)
concerns how disagreements were handled in some of these letters.
80 In some Schreiner archives,
letters have been separated from their envelopes so that dating is extremely
difficult or impossible; in some collections, groups of her correspondences
have been amalgamated by date order; while in others, the order the letters
were in (at donation or sale) is not a temporal one but presumably had significance
for the original correspondent.
81 See Hill (1993), and
also Grigg (1991) and Hinding (1993) on how archiving impacts on significant
aspects of how collections are understood by users.
82 When Janet Flanner's private letters to her lover were opened because
of censorship regulations, she found this highly intrusive, although used
to her New Yorker letters being read by thousands of people; see Pearl,
2002.
83 Wordsworth, 1984.
230
84 Sackville-West, 1984.
85 L. Woolf, 1989; and V.
Woolf, 1976; 1977; 1978; 1979; 1980.
86 Stanley (2000a) argues
that an ethics of writing characterizes her intellectual project more widely.
87 Woolf, 1976; 1977; 1978; 1979; 1980.
88 For instance, the Vindolanda
letters of c. AD 100 are on wooden tablets covered in wax and sometimes feature
a number of different handwritings.
89 However, computer technology
and Web developments may change this, particularly where there are no copyright
considerations.
90 Brogan on Ransome (1998)
provides an alternative, by writing a narrative around the letters published
in their entirety, stitching these together with passages picked from the
letters not published in full. The result gives an overall impression of
the writer's epistolary concerns and activities that is not `true' to the
originals, although closely mirroring editorial concerns.
91 Chapple and Pollard, 1966; Chapple, 1980. This issue arises concerning every published edition of letters; among other matters, it raises how to reference such collections, under the
name of the letter writer or that of the editor/s. Herein, published letters
are referenced under the name of the letter writer, and correspondences under
the editor/s.
92 Usually. However, sometimes
editorial intervention goes so far as to produce `a letter' which is almost
unrecognizable when compared with the original, of which various Schreiner
letters as edited by Cronwright-Schreiner are cases in point.
93 Kingsley, 1883.
94 With regard to the writer's
end of this, and also concerning their presumption of a reading audience,
fictional letters have a similar materiality.
95 As witnessed by circumstances
when letters are found to be forgeries, as with Mary Queen of Scots and the
`Casket Letters'.
96 The basis of the first
sustained sociological use of letters, by Thomas and Znaniecki, 1927.
97 Stanley, 1987; 1992.
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NOTE
ON CONTRIBUTOR LIZ STANLEY is Research Chair of Sociology at the University
of Newcastle. She is currently in the process of completing a new edition
of Olive Schreiner's letters, as well as having a wider interest in theorizing
auto/biography. Relevant publications include articles on the Schreiner letters
and also Mourning becomes ... Post/memory; Commemoration and the concentration
camps of the South African War (2005, in press; Manchester University Press
and Rutgers University Press).