15+ Epistolary Novels Free! [PDF]

Letters have served as a resource for literature for many years. If you like this broad genre, then our collection of epistolary novels in PDF format is for you. 

Letters have a special charm that, with technological development, has ceased to be valued by the new generations. Until the end of the 20th century, they had great social relevance.

Epistolary novels were very popular during the 18th and 19th centuries. The epistle (letter) was not only used as a means of communication between people in real life but also as a narrative device to shape the plot of a novel.

The epistolary novel is a narrative genre that consists of a series of fictional letters that shape the story. It is a means or resource where the characters tell a series of important events for the plot.

We invite you to take a look at our selection of more than 15 epistolary novels in PDF format and discover an interesting and entertaining narrative genre for your reading days. Download your favorites in this section of our virtual library for free.

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Featured Epistolary Novels

1) Lady Susan

Author: Jane Austen

In this book, Austen relates the plans drawn up by the protagonist, Lady Susan, who has recently been widowed. These plans have the main objective of finding a new husband for her, and at the same time, the widow tries to marry her daughter, who is sixteen years old.

Lady Susan is an epistolary work in which the author uses different letters that intertwine with each other like puzzle pieces, to finally build a story full of small intrigues. In this book, the writer overturns all the rules of romance novels.

Lady Susan plays an active role, she is a beautiful, intelligent and witty woman, and all the men who want her are considerably younger than she is.

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*Public Domain Material

2) Poor Folk

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Poor Folk is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first novel, which was written in the span of nine months between 1844 and 1845. 

Dostoevsky had financial difficulties due to his extravagant lifestyle and developing gambling addiction; although he had produced some translations of foreign novels, they met with little success and he decided to write a novel of his own to try to raise funds.

Inspired by the works of Gogol, Pushkin, and Karamzin, as well as English and French authors, “Poor People” is written in the form of letters between the two main characters, Makar Devushkin and Varvara Dobroselova, who are poor third cousins.

The novel depicts the life of the poor, their relationship with the rich, and poverty in general, all common themes of literary naturalism.

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*Public Domain Material

3) Dangerous Liaisons

Author: Pierre Choderlos De Laclos

Dangerous Liaisons is a famous work published in 1782. Inscribed in the eighteenth-century trend of licentious satire, as well as the psychological novel, it also stands out for the great technical complexity it achieves as an epistolary novel.

The Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, once lovers, take every opportunity to ridicule the puritanical and privileged society in which they live, using all those around them, and leaving behind a long list of erotic conquests.

The correspondence between these two characters, in which they relate their exploits, constitutes the central body of the story, in which the different subplots are inscribed.

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*Public Domain Material

Epistolary Novels

Lady Susan

Jane Austen

Poor Folk

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dangerous Liaisons

Pierre Choderlos De Laclos

Dracula

Bram Stoker

Evelina, Or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance Into the World

Fanny Burney

Daddy-Long-Legs

Jean Webster

The Sorrows of Young Werther

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Anne Brontë

Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded

Samuel Richardson

The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

Tobias Smollett

You Know Me Al: A Busher's Letters

Ring Lardner

Clarissa, Or, The History of a Young Lady

Samuel Richardson

Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister

Aphra Behn

The Kempton-Wace Letters

Anna Strunsky and Jack London

Hyperion

Friedrich Hölderlin

Leonora

Maria Edgeworth

The Moonstone

Wilkie Collins

The Black Robe

Wilkie Collins

An Englishwoman’s Love Letters

Laurence Housman

Here ends our selection of free Epistolary Novels in PDF format. We hope you liked it and already have your next book!

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