“Vertue and Decency”: The Gendering of Character in Eighteenth-Century English Epistolary Fiction

Abstract

What constitutes an authentic epistolary character? Reading epistolary fiction’s generic conventions to assess the development of novelistic characterisation allows for a critical re-evaluation of the letter-narrative’s centrality to the long eighteenth-century English novel. By examining the generic limitations of the epistolary mode, and reading a selection of epistolary fictions for their interests in gender, conjugality, identity, and a politicised account of virtue, this thesis explores the emergence of character as a central element of the English novel. Amatory narratives within epistolary fictions resist the representation of the mature woman, focusing instead upon the vulnerable, marginal, and marriageable figure of the ‘girl’ in order to realise the ossification of a conjugal dyad of husband/wife as the centre of the household and societal unit. Closely analysing the conventions of characterisation within the epistolary mode allows for a new understanding of how these generic markers contributed to formal representations of psychological subjects. Taking as its case studies Mary Davys’s Love and Friendship (1718), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–48), Jane Austen’s ‘Sir Charles Grandison or the happy man. A comedy’ (c.1800) and Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), this thesis reads across the intersection of gender and genre in the eighteenth-century novel-in-letters to interpret this intersection as constitutive of the gradual realisation of modern, realist, and autonomous representations of character.