With the expansion of the postal system from the mid seventeenth century, there was a growing interest in epistolary writing. Like real letter writers, authors of early epistolary novels focus on the material conditions of communication by letter. The most common plot devices have to do with what can go wrong in the postal system. Letter novels typically present themselves as a collection of real letters, a packet that has been lost and found, or entrusted to a friend who arranged for their publication. Epistolary fiction appealed to readers newly fascinated with how intimate thoughts could be expressed in writing, and what pleasure, as well as utility, could be drawn from reading the private thoughts of others. The letter novel was also congenial to some of the core aspirations of Enlightenment thought: a commitment to dialogical thinking, an openness to cultural difference, the notion of a ‘Republic of letters’ formed by conversational exchange between educated people who were often geographically separated. While epistolary fiction declined in popularity in the nineteenth century, letter novels have continued to resurface as experiments in narrative form, well suited to exploring contrasting subjectivities and the endless opportunities for failed and interrupted communication in the modern world.

While French literary history usually presumes a firm tradition of the epistolary novel running from Lettres portuguaises in 1669 to the end of the following century, this chapter demonstrates that the form's rise was protracted, and proceeded in two stages. A first, modest popularity was achieved by novels of satirical observation. Formally, these epistolary novels were distinct from the much more successful epistolary novels that followed, which featured a polyphonic exchange of correspondence. Viewed formally, the history of the epistolary novel in France is largely discontinuous, though the polyphonic variant's own development displays the same isomorphism visible in other novelistic artifacts examined in this book.