Gerald Terborch (1617-1681), Woman Writing a Letter (c. 1655)
On this page the reader interested in epistolary literature will find: 1) a bibliography of sources for studying any and all kinds of epistolary literature; 2) two of my published essays, one delivered as a lecture to the Trollope Society; the other, an essay-review published in an academic periodical; 3) essays I wrote and sent to listservs as postings on epistolarity in the novels of Richardson, Austen, and Trollope; and 4) a description of my dissertation.
A slightly different version of this essay appears in The Sixteenth Century Journal: The Journal of Early Modern Studies, 33/2 (2001), 632-636.
An abbreviated version of this essay was delivered to the Trollope Society in the Library of the Reform Club as the Twelfth Annual Lecture on 23 November 1999. A fuller version was published in the February 2000 Trollopiana.
Richardson, Romance, and Reverie: A Dissertation.
This is a study of the psychological bases of romance as genre particularly appealing to women as readers and writers; of the close connections between romance and the creative state behind novel-writing called reverie; and of epistolary narrative as a dramatic and pictorial technique which naturally emerges when this genre and imaginative state combine. It is available from University Microfilms International.
Isabelle de Charrière (1740-1805) by Quentin de la Tour
Page Last Updated 29 March 2003