Diana G. Barnes promises “a study of how familiar letters published in manual, prose and poetic forms were used to imagine community in early modern England, the kinds of community imagined, the importance of gender to those communities, and the political significance of these ideas in historical context” (5). The project assumes that letter writing is socially, politically, economically embedded dialogue, whether it is actual correspondence, a collection of model letters, or a work of fiction or of philosophy, originally written in English or translated from another language, by single or multiple authors, male or female. The assumption is sound, but the topic is unwieldy, even with manuscript letters excluded: key differences in kinds of printed letter writing are brushed aside and changing conceptions of the familiar letter left undefined. Barnes eschews the “continuous history” (15) that her title implies in favor of offering six case studies.

Fortunately, Barnes’s studies of the Caroline court, the Civil War, and the Restoration (chapters 3–5) offer a strong, unified, and lively narrative of responses to crises of community by epistolary readers and writers. Developing her earlier published work, she demonstrates by close textual analysis and detailed attention to context her argument linking four cases: Jerome Hainhofer’s 1638 The Secretary of Ladies, a translation from French of Jacques du Bosque’s 1635 collection; the letters of Charles I and his queen, Henrietta Maria, seized and published by Parliament, with commentary, as The Kings Cabinet Opened (1645); and Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters and Philosophical Letters (1664). Amid scandals over conversions at court under the influence of Charles I’s French Catholic consort, Du Bosque’s translator Hainhofer sought patronage and protection for crypto-Catholics by dedicating to the royal governess Mary Sackville what seem to be fictional letters of friendship by two aristocratic French women whose salon culture fosters female intellection and even sexuality independent of patriarchal control. Parliament published the royal letters, with commentary, in The King’s Cabinet Opened in order to reveal Charles’s effeminate subjugation to his wife and thus undermine his authority as monarch. In her Sociable Letters, one side of a fictionalized dialogue between aristocratic women, Cavendish “refigures the relationship between gender and genre established during the pamphlet wars, to present virtuous feminine friendship as a mode of sociable exchange unpolluted by recent battles and factions, and thus a pristine foundation for the reinvigoration of royalist civilities” (137–39). She thus answers the misogynist reaction to recent events by the Royalist James Howell, expressed in his epistles. In Philosophical Letters Cavendish justifies her published critique of Thomas Hobbes and other philosophers as answers to queries addressed to her by the friend of Sociable Letters. Cavendish asserts her own respect for social and marital hierarchy but also for epistolary community and for truth.

Barnes’s earlier chapters might have prepared for this core discussion by exploring reader expectations of class and gender established by Renaissance traditions of letter writing, but she treats her Elizabethan cases independently of the Stuart ones. While her introduction appropriately offers Gabriel Harvey’s Earthquake Letter to Edmund Spenser as an example of humanist patriarchal misogyny, chapters 1 and 2 on Angel Day’s The English Secretary (1586, revised 1593–99) and Michael Drayton’s England’s Heroicall Epistles (1597) lack focus, depending too heavily on citation of recent scholarship and too little on close textual and contextual analysis. Frequent misspellings and some grammatical carelessness suggest inadequate copyediting. Barnes discusses gender in Day’s radical revision of his handbook’s model love-letters from 1586 to 1593, but she does not recognize the diverse traditions of letter-writing that his two different versions reflect: in 1586, fictional letters by Pietro Aretino and other Italian pamphleteers; from 1593 on, humanist rhetorical instruction in epistolary art for upwardly mobile men, influenced by Italian handbooks for secretaries. Day teaches rhetoric in his revised version through epistolary models of marriage negotiation with a conventionally chaste female. Barnes clearly identifies Drayton’s model, Ovid’s Heroides, but overlooks female predominance in Elizabeth’s reign as an explanation for Ovidian literary fashions.

Although Barnes’s remarks on Elizabethan letters remain hesitant, her book admirably contributes to the study of epistolary community in mid-seventeenth-century England.