SOURCE: “Letter Fiction and the Search for Human Nature” and “Romantic Love and Sexual Fantasy in Epistolary Fiction,” in Women, Letters, and the Novel, AMS Press, 1980, pp. 1-26; 137-67.

In the first excerpt below, Perry describes the social and economic conditions of early eighteenth-century England and their influence of the surging popularity of epistolary fiction, a literary genre that offered unprecedented opportunity for women writers and their concerns. In the second excerpt, she discusses the changing sexual mores of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and how this was depicted in the romantic fantasies of epistolary fiction.

London was a brutal and disorderly place in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Ruffians lurked in the dirty, badly lit streets to rob and harass the wealthier citizens. John Evelyn was robbed several times at home and on the road. Samuel Pepys reports lying afraid in his bed...