The demise of literary letters

I’ve been reading some of George Orwell’s letters lately (I do read other authors, honest) and it’s made me a bit nostalgic for the days before email. I still write letters from time to time – to my friends who I know would rather have a well-written letter every 3 or 4 months than a short email every week. I’m sure a lot of other people do too but I generally think that the art of writing letters is in its twilight years. Collections of good, entertaining letters from great writers of the 20th century are generally revered – whether they’re Orwell, Kingsley Amis, de Beauvoir and Satre or anyone else. But I’ll bet anything that the average modern author living in a society where having broadband at home is as common as running water writes very few letters. And let’s face it, if ‘The Complete Emails of Zadie Smith’ were published in 30 or 40 years time, I don’t think I’d be buying them – even though she is one of my favourite writers.

I wonder too whether the demise of literary letters might be contributing to the decline of the epistolary form in the novel. When I was in my very early teens, one of my favourite books was Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster, a novel composed in the form of letters written by a college girl to her secret benefactor, whose identity isn’t revealed until the very end. I haven’t read it since I was about 14 and I remember very little of the actual text, but I do recall absolutely loving the fact that it was written in letters – it somehow made it much more accessible to my young self. I’ve always had a weakness for epistolary novels since – Aravind Adiga’s riveting The White Tiger is probably the most modern example I can think of – but they are few and far between these days.

I’ve only read one novel composed entirely from emails sent between characters and I didn’t think it had much punch. Then again, that might have been more because it was written by Meg Cabot who wrote the Princess Diaries (its title escapes me now) and it was very flimsy and unchallenging (just what I needed at the time), rather than a weakness in the form itself. But generally, I just don’t think any book written in email form would have quite the same lyrical grace about it as one written in the form of letters. Of course, it can be successful on occasion; the beginning of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty – “One may as well begin with Jerome’s emails to his father” – is a wonderful modern mirroring of the opening line of EM Forster’s Howard’s End, “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister”. But I can’t think of any other examples just now – perhaps time will prove me wrong.

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