Texts from the Underground

Saturday Morning Writing Prompt

The epistolary—that beloved form in which the author conveys the story through documents—is as old as storytelling itself, but it really blew up in the 18th century as a tool for moral instruction and an intimate kind of realism that gets to the heart of the interpersonal. It gives readers a little voyeuristic thrill, like we’re reading someone else’s private diaries and correspondence, but it also has a cool grounding in feminism. The genre welcomed women writers, then grew into a tradition of men imitating women, and from there continued to be a style known for subverting gender expectations and binaries.