Chapter 4, ‘Ethics and the Everyday’, demonstrates how letter-writing creates a porous space where questions in ethics, ethnography, and everyday living intersect with cultures of friendship, citizenship, and reciprocity in ways that anticipate our late modern fascination with the experiential. Intersubjective sense-making, solidarity, hospitality, and the gift are approached through perspectives drawn from the thought of Jacques Derrida, and from care studies, material culture studies, and eudaimonics. The chapter begins with an investigation of the epistolary encounter with both ordinary and exceptional things, asking how particular objects – the proximate and palpable – inscribe the epistolary imaginary and create a sense of material thickness in letter-writing. Curiosity, attentiveness, and the investment of care in things reveal a sustained commitment to the world of objects, repositories of ethical, eudaimonic, and heuristic value. This ethical commitment informs letter-writing around cultures of gifting. If the sharing of benefits is a major conduit of friendship, modes of calibration temper and regulate relations of power and influence in letter-writing.

The book’s Conclusion offers reflections on the thematic and stylistic distinctiveness of the selected letter-writing, and its resonance for today’s readers – researchers and wider reading publics. The comparative and thematic connectedness of the correspondence of Mallarmé, Van Gogh, Morisot, Cézanne, and Zola has shone a powerful light on the capacity and the value of letters as life documents, as life-lessons, and, at times, as living letters. The Conclusion traces pathways for future critical work, drawing out some of the theoretical aspects of the book as a flexible form of critical practice for humanities researchers whether in the epistolary study of global elites or of individuals and communities whose everyday lives have yet to be fully valued by scholars and general audiences. The Conclusion reflects speculatively on the critical value and interdisciplinary potential of a comparative and thematic epistolarity studies within the landscape of modernist studies.

Chapter 1, ‘Unlocking Capacity’, contextualises and conceptualises the epistolarium in its thematic, stylistic, and comparative implications. The chapter begins by asking how we might engage with major collections of letters beyond traditional fact-mining. How might selected letters, by different hands, be explored as a site of consciousness and creativity? Appraising the leading editions of the letters of our five authors and artists, the chapter considers the traditional purposes of letter-editing. In pursuit of facticity, letter-editing traditionally subsidiarises the expressivity of everyday experience: Letterworlds tackles that critical blind spot. Arguing for an immersive reading of letters that can reveal a deeper human narrative, the chapter reviews pioneering approaches to the everyday across cultural sociology, epistolarity studies, and autobiography studies. The book’s major critical axes are introduced: sensory studies, theories of ‘negative community’, and everyday ethics. The material culture of letter-writing, from stationery supplies, via salutations and signatures, to postal networks, is explored in parallel with letterish creativity and modernist performativity.

The Introduction, ‘Thinking Letterworlds’, makes the case for reading the letter-writing of major modern artists and authors through the prism of their everyday lived experience. Whilst the creativity of Mallarmé, Van Gogh, Morisot, Cézanne, and Zola reaches deep into our cultural imaginary, their letter-writing on matters of physical and mental health, daily habits, community, leisure, solitude, ethics, and material culture is rarely studied in its own right. The book’s aims are thus outlined: to develop an integrative and comparative approach to reading letters through selected approaches in modern critical thought; to explore the deeper narrative of everyday preoccupations in letter-writing; to bring fresh critical attention to the expressivity of everyday letters by examining modes of realism, irony, metaphoricity, and fantasy; to advance a critical redistribution of literary value that recognises the creativity of everyday letter-writing; to consider how letter-writing of the past resonates with readers today in its concerns with the lived body, with subjectivity and social relations, with pressures of work, and with the intermittences of private life.

Chapter 3, ‘Solitude and Community’, argues against the traditional dichotomising of solitude and community, shedding light on the precarious balance sought, in letter-writing, between these formative human experiences. Examining the distinctive strands of solitude, aloneness, and loneliness in the personal and creative contexts of the five letter-writers, the chapter works to expose their preoccupation with aversive isolation and the corrective found in the situatedness of solitude. How does letter-writing negotiate relations of togetherness and community for authors and artists in their creative solitude? How do solitude and togetherness coincide, or compete, in the letter writers’ experience of home and habitat, and of the natural world? Critical perspectives developed from the thought of Montaigne, Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Rancière illuminate the tensions between enabling solitude and constraining community. These tensions are assuaged, if never ultimately resolved, through forms of connected retreat. Sounding affinities between letter-writing and literature, the chapter reflects, finally, on solitude in the immanence of modernist writing.

Chapter 2, ‘The Embodied Letter’, examines the embodied consciousness in selected letters of the writers and painters. Drawing on critical thought in the medical humanities and in sensory studies, the chapter investigates the epistolary articulacy of body and mind through modes that span the documentary and the fantastic. First, the work of the sensorium is explored through the epistolary entanglement of the senses – from touch and taste to kinesthetics and proprioception. The chapter examines epistolary representations of wellbeing and illness, stories of embarrassing bodies, chronicles of everyday ‘troubles’, and the letterish discussion of public health, self-care, work, and leisure. The preoccupation with mental health and mental illness comes sharply into relief in epistolary evocations of boredom, exasperation, and depression, and their physical manifestations. Whilst such instances echo nineteenth-century literary evocations of spleen, they speak powerfully to some of our pressing contemporary concerns. End-of-life letters reveal a profound engagement with finitude through fragmentary narratives of struggle, separation, and mourning threaded with sustaining resilience.

Artists have painted monumental images on walls throughout time. Images as diverse as the stampeding bulls and horses in the prehistoric caves of Lascaux, Dordogne, France (c. 17000 BCE, Figure 0.1), the enigmatic scenes at the pre-Columbian Maya site of San Bartolo in Guatemala (c. 300 BCE–50 CE), and the languid Bodhisattvas from the fifth century in the Ajanta cave 1 in India (Figure 0.2), decorated tombs, shrines, temples and houses. Fragmentary survivals from Greece, Crete, Rome, and early Christian Europe attest to a continuous tradition of mural painting in the West. Wall paintings reflected profound social change by embracing new imagery, formats, and styles. Striking examples survive in the late Roman catacombs. Murals in the catacomb of Saints Peter and Marcellinus in Rome from the late third or early fourth century CE were painted in a simplified Roman technique and depict images, such as the Good Shepherd, that appealed to pagan, Jewish, and Christian worshippers.