An epistolary novel is told through a series of documents—usually letters, but sometimes diary entries, newspaper clippings, or electronic messages. The story emerges from the correspondence itself.

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa established the form in English; later examples include Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Stoker’s Dracula, and numerous modern experiments with emails, texts, and mixed media. The method creates immediacy and intimacy; readers feel they are overhearing private communication. It also allows multiple perspectives when several correspondents contribute, and it can generate suspense through the gaps and delays between letters.

Challenges include maintaining plausibility—why would characters write in such detail?—and avoiding monotony. Skilled practitioners vary the voices, use the gaps between documents for dramatic effect, and let the form itself become part of the meaning. The epistolary novel remains a flexible vehicle for exploring subjectivity, unreliability, and the ways written communication shapes relationships.

When a novel’s narrative is carried entirely by the letters or documents its characters produce, it is epistolary.