Beware “Passionate Billets”: Gender and Epistolary Networks in the Early Eighteenth-Century British World

Everyone loves love letters. This was as true for early modern readers as it is for readers today. While we are aware of the performative nature of letters, perusing them still seems to offer a tantalizing and transgressive look into the personal lives of the writers. Love letters also allow us to see women writers during courtship, a point when they held the power in the relationship. However focusing on love letters is a dangerous proposition. On the beneficial side they show a moment of interaction, of women and men exchanging letters. This shifts the discussion away from a focus on one gender. Yet most letters were not love letters and most letters were not like love letters. Writers were more concerned with nurturing wide social networks than with cultivating deeply personal relationships. This paper looks at love letters, but it places them into a wider epistolary context. It examines the letters, both amorous and mundane, of five different British men and women to show that love letters were not the norm and that a focus on them obscures the way society functioned. It will argue that to understand the import of gender in letter writing and in society at large we need to stop looking at how women used letters or at the role gendered language played in defining how individuals wrote letters. This isolates these specific networks. Instead we need to look at the role gender and letters played in pulling together the wide-ranging social networks that the British elite were increasingly dependent upon to function socially, politically and economically.