Following how much I liked Pride and Prejudice, I listened to Who Was Jane Austen? Sorting Fact from Fiction, a series of essays written and narrated by Stephanie Insley Hershinow.
What I found most interesting was that Pride and Prejudice may have originally been written as an epistolary, a series of letters exchanged between characters. I’d never heard the term before. This theory makes a lot of sense considering how much of Pride and Prejudice focuses on reading and writing letters. Epistolary novels were common at the time, Frankenstein and Dracula being late examples, but when I think about the concept of them now, they seem much more rare and experimental. House of Leaves actually fits the extended definition of an epistolary: collections of any type of documents. Perhaps the letters, in-depth movie analyses, lists, and editor footnotes that compose House of Leaves aren’t so experimental after all, although people in the 18th century would probably shocked by the bizarre formatting and content.
Jane Austen was among authors who moved away from the epistolary format at the start of the 18th century. Perhaps she could be considered an experimental writer!
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