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Epistolary Writing: Letter and Diary Forms

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  • 0:05 What Is Epistolary Writing?
  • 0:56 Letters
  • 2:36 Diaries
  • 4:20 Other Epistolary Forms
  • 5:32 Lesson Summary
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Lesson Transcript
Instructor: Maria Howard

Maria is a teacher and a learning specialist and has master's degrees in literature and education.

In this lesson, you will discover that prose writing can take on different formats, from letters and diary entries to newspaper clippings and interviews. Explore how writers of both non-fiction and fiction tell stories through these different forms.

What Is Epistolary Writing?

Captain's log, stardate 9522.6: I've never trusted Klingons, and I never will... With just a few words, I am transported (or is it beamed?) to the world of the popular TV series and movie franchise 'Star Trek'. While not all of Star Trek is told through journal-like entries like this, its screenwriters often used Captain Kirk's log as a way to convey information and set up their latest intergalactic adventures.

While the word 'epistolary' is an adjective meaning 'of or related to letters', epistolary writing uses forms like letters, diary and journal entries, and other types of documents, to tell a story and deliver a message, from the Bible and C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters', to Bram Stoker's Dracula and Anne Frank's diary.

Letters

Letters have been a form of writing since the beginning, but leave it to the Ancient Greeks to step it up a notch by writing epistles, or formal letters, to groups of people at once, telling them how to behave and how to live their lives. Historically, the most famous epistles are from the New Testament, mostly written by Saint Paul and other early Church leaders to groups like the Romans or the Corinthians.

In 1942, C. S. Lewis (of The Chronicles of Narnia fame) published his novel, The Screwtape Letters. Lewis's book takes the form of a series of 31 fictional (that means made-up) letters from a demon bureaucrat named Screwtape to his lower-ranking nephew Wormwood, another government worker in Hell. Screwtape's letters advise his nephew on how to tempt the humans he is charged with leading astray - which is all just an elaborate way for Lewis to instruct his readers on how to avoid sin and live good, Christian lives.

Not all epistolary works are so concerned with telling us how to lead good, clean lives. Two other well-known novels that use a letter format are Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky's Poor Folk (1846) and American Alice Walker's 1982 novel, The Color Purple. For each novel using the letter format, point-of-view, or the scope of the narrative voice telling the story, is limited to the characters writing the letters.

For example, The Color Purple is an epistolary novel told through letters written by a poor black teenage girl, Celie, to both God and her sister, so we only hear about Celie's difficult life through her own words and her direct experiences. Author Alice Walker's choice to tell us the story using Celie's voice gives Celie a kind of power she doesn't have in her everyday life.

Diaries

Written from June 1942 to August 1944 by a teenage Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl documents her thoughts and feelings, some important and others seemingly trivial. A month after she receives the diary as a gift, Anne and her family and family friends are forced into hiding in an office building in Amsterdam to escape religious persecution from the Nazis.

At the beginning of her diary, Anne writes: I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.

Knowing how Anne's story ends before starting to read Diary of a Young Girl adds another layer to these words from her first entry. The Secret Annex was discovered in August 1944 by the Nazis, and Anne and all but one of the eight people hiding with her die in concentration camps within a year. The sole survivor, Anne's father Otto Frank, returns to Amsterdam and her diary is published in 1947.

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You are viewing lesson Lesson 4 in chapter 4 of the course:

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English 103: Analyzing and Interpreting Literature

10 chapters | 81 lessons | 15 flashcard sets

Ch 4. Prose
Ch 5. Short Fiction

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