Censored Sentiments: Letters and Censorship in Epistolary Novels and Conduct Material

This book offers a new perspective on women as letter writers and on the eighteenth-century increase in, and subsequent decline of, epistolary fiction. In order to better understand the role epistolary fiction played in English, French, Italian, and to a lesser extent, American society, it is necessary to read such fiction in the context of conduct books with their theories of what women should be and their reflections on literature. Such a reading takes into account not only letter writers and their addressees, but also the censors who read, intercepted, suppressed, criticized, corrected, forged, altered, falsified, misdirected, censored, and rewrote female letters in an effort to achieve a perfect specimen of female epistolary writing.