Famous Epistolatory Books

These are books, mainly novels, written in the form of letters between the characters. One of the earliest was Samuel Richardson's "Pamela", which tells the travails of a young servant girl, written by her to her parents. It was wildly popular even among the poorer classes as evinced by a blacksmith reading it aloud to his friends. It was also savagely parodied by Henry Fielding, the author of "Tom Jones" in his "Shamela."

Jane Austen also wrote a novella "Lady Susan" in this form, relating the title character's unsavoury doings, as written in letters by her acquaintances to each other. The crux of the story is the Lady Susan's enslavement of a man who already knows her unscrupulousness, & then discarding him, triumphantly. 

Jean Webster's "Daddy Longlegs" comprises the one-sided correspondence of the improbably named Jerusha Abbott, an orphan, written to her unseen patron. What happens when she finally meets him is the surprise of the story.

Helene Hanff's "84, Charing Cross Road" though not a novel, deals with the letters between an American bibliophile & an English bookseller. It has made this address second only to "221B, Baker Street" in fame.

The Kannada story "Sunanda" by Srimathi, also written as a letter, deals with the marriage of the eponymous war widow with a widower with two children. After marriage, she convinces her husband to bring back his children from his parents & looks after them as her own. Even after having her own children, she makes no distinction between them, thus winning the hearts of her parents-in-law also, who now tell everyone that Sunanda is their own daughter.