SOURCE: Introduction to Laclos and the Epistolary Novel, Librairie Droz, 1963, pp. 11-17.

In the following introduction to her study of Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses, Thelander discusses in general terms why the epistolary form was thought to be more realistic than narrative fiction and how it allowed the author to depict characters from multiple perspectives.

Today, so few epistolary novels are published that we tend to forget that the genre is more than another eighteenth-century phenomenon like the mania for parfilage which, one year, threatened all the epaulettes of Paris. Long before Richardson, the basic premises of the novel by letters had been established; the techniques employed by eighteenth-century writers cannot be considered as original. Ancient models were known and copied during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance when other forerunners of the epistolary novel were composed. Ovid's Heroides, a series of letters in verse from heroines...