Chapter 1 offers an overview of the larger themes addressed by the book, focusing on the question of contingency and how letters can be considered as literary ‘works’. The chapter argues that chance or happenstance itself governs letters and letter-writing both in material and in affective or conceptual ways. It proposes that the ‘radical contingency’ of letters can be said to set them apart from literary works more specifically conceived, in the sense that the latter do not generally and in principle hold a primary or formative connection with the specific events surrounding their composition. The chapter argues that the question of contingency connects with Keats’s governing ideas about life – with what he repeatedly refers to in his letters as life’s ‘circumstances’, ‘chance’, or ‘accidents’.

Chapter 3 focuses on a small number of letters from Keats to his poet-friend John Hamilton Reynolds written in the first few months of their friendship, in late 1817 and early 1818. As aspiring young poets, Reynolds and Keats developed a close, competitive-collaborative friendship in which the exchange of letters played an important part. The chapter examines the ways in which some of the main tenets of Keats’s conceptual or theoretical sense of both letter-writing and literary criticism arose out of the interchange of letters with a poet with whom he actively collaborated. Through a reading of Keats’s commentary on the power of Shakespeare’s poems and plays, the chapter argues that letter-writing is intrinsically collaborative, and that in his letters to Reynolds, Keats also emphasizes the collaborative or corresponding quality of both literature and literary criticism.

Chapter 8 looks at a critical moment in Keats’s life in order to trace the way, in his letters, he works through a crucial decision about his future as a writer. Focusing on a series of interlinked and in some ways ‘porous’ letters written during a single week in September 1819, the chapter discusses Keats’s sense that he is, or soon will be, ‘unpoeted’ – that he can no longer be a poet. Alone in the small city of Winchester, Keats writes a series of often overlapping letters that ultimately move him towards a decision concerning whether or not to end his career as a poet. The chapter aligns the specific circumstances of the limited space of the cathedral city in which Keats is temporarily staying with the limited space of the letter-page itself and examines how he resolves a critical life choice in and through correspondence.

Chapter 7 builds on, while in some ways reversing, the analysis in Chapter 6. It examines the thirty-nine surviving letters from Keats to Fanny Brawne from the perspective of their distancing function. Keats’s often distinctly fraught and sometimes emotionally coercive letters and notes to Fanny mostly date from the summer and early autumn of 1819, when he was away from London on a writing retreat, and from February to March 1820, when he was living right next door to the Brawne family at Wentworth Place in Hampstead but was often too unwell to see her. The chapter considers Keats’s love letters as informed and even instructed by the writers he happens to be reading (especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Philip Massinger), arguing that what he is reading can itself distance the writer from his recipient as much as bring the two together: Keats’s epistolary intertextuality itself distances him from the object of his desire.

The book ends with a brief Postscript on not reading letters. It examines the correspondence between Keats’s friend and carer Joseph Severn and Keats’s friends back in London as the poet is dying in Rome in the winter of 1820–1. The correspondence records how, having effectively stopped writing poetry more than a year earlier, Keats is now no longer able to read, let alone write, even letters. The chapter argues that this epistolary stoppage has itself fed into the cultural reception of the life and work of a poet who has become admired, respected, and loved for his correspondence as much as for his poems.

Chapter 5 proposes that friendship is one of the founding principles of, and one of the main reasons for writing, familial letters. It focuses on the exchange of letters between Keats and his friend the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon, suggesting that the exchange itself sustained but also threatened the friendship because of its engagement with a paradoxical logic of reciprocity that governs both friendship and letter-writing. The chapter pays particular attention to the inherent contingency of epistolary friendship – friendship that is supplemented or sustained by epistolary contact – in the case of Keats’s mutually flattering but sometimes difficult relationship with a man who shared the poet’s sense of artistic ambition while lacking his talent and genius. As a form of gift exchange, the interchange of letters between two friends may be said to be governed by the economics of an implicit but difficult and ultimately paradoxical reciprocity.

Chapter 4 surveys the ways in which imperial officials were represented in various forms of late ancient Christian literature. In so doing, it acts as an introduction to Part II, which explores how contemporaries conceived of distinctly Christian forms of political service in this period. There is not a straightforward ‘archive’ of sources for this problem. Texts on government by current or former administrators do not tend to discuss the implications of their religious identities. As a result, it is rare that we can reconstruct an officeholder’s own perspective. At the same time—and in sharp contrast to other Christian authority figures (emperors, bishops, ascetics)—there is no single genre of Christian literature which focuses consistently on the careers of imperial or royal officials. This chapter thus considers how the purposes, audiences and generic expectations of letters, sermons, church histories, and saints’ lives shaped (and sometimes demanded) positive portrayals of officials, their religious identities, and their interactions with Christian communities and authority figures.

Chapter 6 opens with a discussion of some of the letters Keats sent his brother and sister-in-law after they migrated to America in the summer of 1818. It explores the paradox that letters can at times generate a sense of intimacy not so much in spite of distance but because of it. It looks at the way in which Keats can find people ‘pressing’ on him, and even oppressive, such that he can seem to value the prosthetic sense of presence offered by a letter and the personal space it can allow a different kind of intimacy. The second half of the chapter considers letters as ‘touching’, particularly in relation to Keats’s love letters to Fanny Brawne, where he seems particularly attuned to the physical touch of a letter and the way that a letter can be emotionally ‘touching’ precisely because it is distanced, mediated, and delayed.

The introduction outlines the key themes of the book and offers brief summaries of individual chapters. It offers a brief overview of Keats’s letters and a summary of their publication history, their reception, and their place in his public reputation. The chapter proposes that Keats’s letters can be considered as a body of work in its own right, and that literary criticism needs to develop an epistolary poetics to enable and support a formal critical reading of his correspondence.

Chapter 4 explores the construction and performance of poetic selfhood in Keats’s letters – and argues that it is in part through letter-writing itself that John Keats becomes a poet. It is in and through letters as much as through the writing of poems that Keats invented for himself a poetic identity (a ‘poetical Character’, as he would call it). The chapter begins by examining Keats’s construction of a poetic self in a number of letters written between April and May 1817 to two mentor-friends, Leigh Hunt and Benjamin Robert Haydon. It then moves to an examination of a cluster of formative letters to and from Keats in the late summer and autumn of 1818, culminating in the presentation of his idea of the poet as ‘camelion’ – as responding to circumstances and changing environments, and ideally as having no ‘identity’ – in a famous letter of October 1818 to Richard Woodhouse.

Chapter 2 looks in detail at some of the ways in which Keats directly addresses the question of letter-writing. It proposes that a careful analysis of key letters can bring to light a Keatsian epistolary poetics. Keats is particularly alert both to the materiality and to the practical aspects of epistolarity, and his letters are characterized by frequent moments in which his interest in what letters are and how they work is foregrounded. He is specifically interested in how letters are constructed and in the tools and materials that form them, as well as more generally in the practical circumstances or contingencies by which they are determined and circumscribed. The chapter proposes that in their inventive and often playful explorations of epistolarity, Keats’s letters display an impulse to push against the generic and formal limits of the mode.

This chapter investigates the outer limits of the Book of Nature: the medieval concept that the world is meant to be read and interpreted by humans in the manner of a book. Authors who invoked the Book of Nature presented the act of metaphorically “reading” the natural world as a way of shoring up human identity against its conceptual outside, with non-human animals imagined as letters inked onto the world’s pages. Drawing on a corpus of allegorical, encyclopedic, and literary texts, the chapter argues that this image was also haunted by a more subversive possibility: that species identity could become as confusing as a real medieval handwritten text, full of blottings and ill-formed letters that threaten to leave the relationship between speech and species in a state of irresolution. Like written letters, non-human animals could produce meanings in the human mind – but also like letters, they could just as easily descend back into their latent status as meaningless shapes.

The so-called dispersed Nerudiana, composed of interviews, speeches, prologues, notes, and letters, provides a necessary horizon to rescue, organize, and disseminate. Nerudian letters, in particular, are a privileged source that has not been cataloged or collected in a single corpus. This surprising daily life of a famous writer, a sort of parallel itinerary, lies vast and dispersed in libraries, private archives, and documentary repositories awaiting a systematic effort that allows the long-awaited “deployment of the self-portrait” (à la Boersner), the ultimate goal of historical-literary research. Without his correspondence, in short, his self-portrait is impoverished, leaving room for criticism, speculation, and political dithyramb.

In the proposed final chapter of the unfinished Pictures and Conversations, Elizabeth Bowen intended to answer the question of whether there ‘is anything uncanny involved in the process of writing?’ For the many writers who appear in her fiction, writing certainly is an uncanny process, capable of mirroring the self and manipulating others. Markie, in To the North, writes on scraps of paper to enact his predatory aims; in The Death of Heart, St Quentin accuses Portia of using her diary to ‘precipitate things’. As Bowen puts the matter, for ‘the writer, writing is eventful; one might say it is in itself eventfulness’. While such uncanny eventfulness would seem to grant the writer an immense power, writing in Bowen’s novels – be it letters, diaries, or novels – often takes on a troubling life of its own. Markie and Portia eventually find themselves thwarted by the after-effects of their writing. Given the tendency of writing to dangerously stray, it is little wonder that so many of Bowen’s writers, such as Iseult Arble in Eva Trout, never complete their masterpieces.

Philosophical and conceptual understandings of time underpin Bowen’s writing, and often these are expressed through experiments with form and narrative. Focusing on Bowen’s novels, this chapter examines how her characters are shown in scalar relation to bigger historical moments or developments, even while the writer holds on to the primacy and singularity of individual experience. It discusses the relationship between history and affect or individual feeling through three interrelated narrative tropes: the temporality of loss, typically broached through themes of adolescence and innocence lost; textual time, or the ‘multitemporal’ qualities of words and letters; and time capsules, or the irruption of the past into the present or future, particularly as a felt experience of wartime. Reading Bowen in context not only emphasises the important issues of her time; it also illuminates the reader’s relationship to her time, and how one might feel and understand intimate attachments to the world in contemporary times.

Lamb’s essays and letters describe various instances in which sharing a book with someone results in feelings of embarrassment or exposure. He describes reading in the public setting of a reading room, the professional context of the period’s review culture, as well as the more intimate, semi-private, and domestic settings in which he reads alongside friends or his sister Mary. Where public and professional contexts promote an element of performance which helps to shield from exposure, Lamb suggests, it is those more intimate forms of shared reading which in fact prove far more personally revealing. As Lamb recounts these moments in a parodic, part-defensive and part-confessional manner, he reflects on what such social phenomena as embarrassment and blushing have to say about sharing more generally.

Keats uses the word ‘interread’ to refer to the way that a letter written to one person will also be read by another. The suggestion of interaction and intersubjectivity implied by that ‘inter’ prefix sheds light on Keats’s representations of shared reading in his poetry and letters. This chapter also considers his portrayal of women readers, especially in relation to Fanny Brawne, whose letters about reading with Keats, as well as his sister Fanny Keats, offer insight into the boundaries of privacy and sharing. Where Keats’s early poems seem eager to get inside the feeling of reading, elsewhere, his manner of picturing reading from the outside aims at a more detached form of sympathy, one which avoids intruding too far into another person’s inner experience. Shared reading subsequently comes to represent for him the possibility of connection at a distance.

This chapter focuses on the role that allusion plays in establishing a shared language of intimacy. It describes how Wollstonecraft and Godwin, in their letters to one another, trade literary allusions as a way of flirting. That practice cast doubt on the transparency of speech, however, since the difficulty of openly expressing feeling, versus the relative ease of slipping into a literary cliché, led to the sense of distrust that also features throughout their letters. The tension between transparency and trust is further explored in the pair’s novels. Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria presents a heroine who falls in love with a man based on the books he reads, in a manner which suggests either quixotic delusion or a defiant trust in the imagination. Godwin’s novels depict scenes of shared reading which rethink his earlier philosophical discussions of personal affection versus independence, and openness versus secrecy or reserve.