Letters, Privacy and the Public Eye in The Coquette

Portrait of a Lady Writing with a Quill, artist unknown, 18th century, via Wikimedia Commons.

In our previous post, we explored how the life of Elizabeth Whitman was transformed into the story of Eliza Wharton, and how private tragedy became public narrative. But the form Hannah Webster Foster chose to tell that story is just as important as the story itself.

The Coquette is an epistolary novel, in that it is told entirely through letters. For readers in the late eighteenth century, this was not an unusual choice. Some of the most widely read and influential works of the period took the same form. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–48), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) all unfold through correspondence.

Letters were not simply a literary device. They were a central part of everyday life. In the eighteenth century, letters served as the primary means of maintaining relationships across distance. They carried news, affection, advice and, often, confession. A letter could be intimate in a way that conversation rarely was. It allowed for reflection, for revision, for the careful shaping of one’s thoughts and feelings. To write a letter was to construct a version of oneself for another person.

At the same time, letters were never entirely private. They could be shared, copied, circulated or preserved. Families read one another’s correspondence. Friends discussed what had been written. Letters might be kept as records, brought forward in disputes, or even published. The boundary between private communication and public document was far more porous than we might imagine.
This tension lies at the heart of The Coquette.

Eliza Wharton’s story is told through the letters she writes and the letters others write about her. We encounter her not through a single, authoritative voice, but through a network of perspectives: her own, her friends’, her suitors’, her mother’s. Each letter reveals something, but each also interprets, judges and reframes. Her reputation is not formed by her actions alone. It is constructed through what is said about her, how her words are read, and how her behaviour is described and re-described by others. This is what makes the novel feel so strikingly modern.

In reading The Coquette, we are not simply witnessing events; we are watching a reputation take shape in real time. A decision is made, a letter is written, a concern is expressed, a judgement is formed. The process is gradual, cumulative and often irreversible. Once an impression has been created, it becomes difficult to undo. In other words, Foster understood something that remains true today: that communication is never neutral. Every message carries not only information, but interpretation. And once those interpretations begin to circulate, they take on a life of their own.

If the eighteenth century had its letters, we have our messages. Text messages, emails, direct messages and posts now serve the same functions that letters once did. They allow us to present ourselves, to explain ourselves, to connect with others across distance. But like letters, they are rarely as private as we might wish. A message can be forwarded. A conversation can be screenshotted. A private exchange can become public within moments. Words written in confidence can be recontextualised, stripped of nuance and shared far beyond their intended audience. The scale is different, and the speed is faster, but the underlying dynamic is familiar.

Like Eliza Wharton, we live in a world where our words can outlive their original moment, where they can be read and judged by people we never intended to address. Reputation is still built through communication, and communication is still subject to interpretation. What The Coquette offers, in this light, is not simply a portrait of eighteenth-century life, but an early exploration of a problem we continue to face: How do we maintain control over our own narrative when it is constantly being shaped by others? How do we speak freely when our words may be preserved, circulated and reinterpreted? And how do we judge others fairly when we see only fragments of their story?

The epistolary novel, often thought of as a relic of a slower, more private age, turns out to anticipate many of the conditions of our own. It reminds us that the tension between privacy and publicity did not begin with the internet. It has always been present, wherever communication leaves a trace. In The Coquette, that trace is written in ink and paper. Today, it is written in pixels and code. But the effect—the shaping of lives through words—remains much the same.

In our final article in this series, we turn to how The Coquette has been read and judged over time. Because the story of Eliza Wharton did not end with the novel itself. It became the subject of an ongoing debate about responsibility, reputation and interpretation.

Read the final article: “The Many Meanings of Eliza Wharton.”

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