Smart Podcast, Trashy Books Podcast

123. Jane and Sarah Discuss Epistolary Romances, and What They’re Reading

This week, Sarah and Jane answer an email from Kendal, who is looking for historical epistolary romances. If you’ve got one we missed that you recommend, please do email us at sjbpodcast@gmail.com! (Sarah in particular loves epistolary novels, as evidenced by this discussion on SBTB from 2012). Then we talk about what we’re reading, and yet again, we agree on a book. It’s getting to be a bit alarming.

Read the transcript

↓ Press Play

This podcast player may not work on Chrome and a different browser is suggested. More ways to listen →

Here are the books we discuss in this podcast:

If you like the podcast, you can subscribe to our feed, or find us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows!

Thanks to our sponsors:

More ways to sponsor:

Sponsor us through Patreon! (What is Patreon?)

What did you think of today's episode? Got ideas? Suggestions? You can talk to us on the blog entries for the podcast or talk to us on Facebook if that's where you hang out online. You can email us at [email protected] or you can call and leave us a message at our Google voice number: 201-371-3272. Please don't forget to give us a name and where you're calling from so we can work your message into an upcoming podcast.

Thanks for listening!

This Episode's Music

The music this week was provided by Sassy Outwater. This week’s music is called “Calgary Capers” and it’s by Peatbog Faeries from their CD Dust. You can find them at their website, or at iTunes.


Podcast Sponsor

Wicked All Night

This podcast is brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Wicked All Night —the latest sizzling-hot novella in the Wicked Lovers series from New York Times bestselling author Shayla Black.

Rachel Linden is a schoolteacher who changed her town, her job, and her life after her divorce. Now, this wallflower is determined to have a little fun—specifically, with Decker McConnell, a bodyguard whose talents under the sheets make her melt.

Until she learns that his motives are just as dangerous as they are wicked…

Download Wicked All Night January 20th!

Transcript

Click to view the transcript

This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks.

Remember to subscribe to our podcast feed, find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Smart Podcast, Trashy Books is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. Find many more outstanding podcasts at Frolic.media/podcasts!
Categorized:

Uncategorized

Add Your Comment →

  1. Rosario says:

    Good podcast today! I’ve got the Erin Satie book in my TBR, and your discussion convinced me to start it next (by the way, I pronounce her name in my head in the French way, as Sah-TEE, probably because it reminds me of a French composer with a really similar name, Erik Satie).

    Anyway, I wanted to suggest a book I’ve just finished for the listener who wanted recs for epistolary novels. Hard Time, by Cara McKenna has some really hot love letters, and they’re a big part of the story, especially in the first half.

  2. SB Sarah says:

    LOL – thanks. I bet you’re right and Jane and I were both saying it wrong. (Our apologies, Erin!)

  3. Cecilia says:

    Claiming the Duchess by Sherry Thomas features a couple that falls in love over letters – though it is not entirely epistolary (besides, it’s a very short story.)

    Paul Vlitos’ Welcome to the Working Week (contemporary and not a romance) is an hilarious novel made only of e-mails and short messages. Very funny.

    Sarah, could you please write down the other epistolary romances you mentioned? I didn’t caught their titles. Thank you!

  4. Katie says:

    I love letters in books–I’d love someone to write a true epistolary romance that was entirely letters–and so I bookmarked this list of historical romances with letters a while back. I haven’t read all of these, but there are some more suggestions here.

  5. SB Sarah says:

    @Cecilia:

    Can you see the book covers in the entry above? If you have an ad blocker they may be hidden from view, but just below the “PRESS PLAY!” should be a few rows of book covers. The books I mentioned are:

    84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
    The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society
    Love in the Afternoon by Lisa Kleypas
    Attachments by Rainbow Rowell
    Almost Like Being in Love by Steve Kluger

  6. Elinor Aspen says:

    @Katie, I recently wrote an entirely epistolary Georgian-set historical romance novella. If I decide to self-publish it, I will probably buy an ad on the SMTB site, so watch this space 😉

  7. Cecilia says:

    Thanks, Sarah. Actually Love in the Afternoon’s cover didn’t appear the first time I loaded this page – don’t know why.

    The titles I missed are Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot by Patricia C. Wrede and Letters from Skye by Jessica Brockmole – I finally caught the titles! (By the way, I’ve been in Skye ages ago.)

  8. Kendal says:

    Thanks for the recs (via the podcast and comments!) — I will now add even more books to my list of TBR.

    And Sarah — you totally nailed it in terms of letters — warmth, charm, and falling into a story. It allows characters to share their thoughts in a realistic way and it has a slower build up than witty banter. Plus, when done well an author can show how a character’s voice changes from the spoken to the written word.

  9. ReneeG says:

    Just finished “The Lover’s Knot” (instead of knitting my left hand mitten). Loved it! The heroine is really interesting and such a good business woman (difficult to be at the time). I worried about the HEA, but I thought it was a very understandable progress for our two primary lovers.

  10. I loved the Griffin & Sabine series and its followup series. If you love postal art and postcards and the idea of reading someone else’s mail, filled with exotic imagery and art and mythology, it’s for you.

    84, Charing Cross Road is one of my all time favorites and the movie isn’t quite nice with Sir Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft. It’s very much a picture of a New York and London that have disappeared with stories about war rations interspersed with book requests. I love a lot of Hanff’s books. Duchess of Bloomsbury is the journal she kept when she finally visited England.

    And echo the Sorcery & Cecilia suggestions — a friend had recced it for years and I finally grabbed it on ebook sale and inhaled it while I was sick. Introduced me to the whole fantasy subgenre of Regencies with magic.

  11. Samanda says:

    Among my favourite historical romance/mysteries written in epistolatory style are the trilogy by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. The heroines are cousins, one written by each author. The titles are Sorcery and Cecilia, The Grand Tour and The Mislaid Magician. They’re light, frothy and engaging.

    The first volume includes the cousins’ courtships and marriages, the second their wedding journey to France and Italy, and the third, ten years later, features their children and a mystery involving a strange young woman who comes to stay with one of the couples.

    All three are told entirely in letters between the cousins, with additional notes between their husbands.

  12. I too remember Griffin and Sabine!

    I have a recommendation for a book like Griffin and Sabine, one with artifacts that the reader has to open and read to have the full story. It’s ARCHIE’S WAR by Marcia Williams. It’s a children’s book about one family’s life and experiences on the homefront in London during World War One, so it’s very timely right now with it being 100 years on. I was very absorbed by it when I read it with my children, and it has the flavor of a very good museum exhibit of artifacts – post cards, the little gifts the royal family sent to soldiers, etc.

    ARCHIE’S WAR totally reminded me of the small but moving museum at Tyne Cot military cemetery in Belgium – yes, it’s a cry book, but it has the involvement of opening and reading all the little bits.

    I had a different take on Meg Cabot’s Boy Next Door – I read it last year when I was trying to figure out how much email/text/epistolary stuff to include in His Road Home, and I realized I wanted to have much more of the characters’ reflection and the action and interaction around them, rather than just pure exchanges of text. I found that the long emails in Boy Next Door didn’t age so well – people have grown shorter in their digital communications (although not me in the comments here, sorry!). The loooooong emails detailing the whole story felt a bit like large shoulder pads, just not modern style. I liked the story bones, but reading Boy Next Door solidified for me that I feel like a 100% epistolary novel works in historicals (LOVE Chocolate Pot!!!) but not in contemporaries, mostly due to the pacing of modern life vs the past.

  13. Michele says:

    One interesting aspect of epistolary novels is the “unreliable narrator.” It’s definitely a different reading experience than third-person omniscient and even than first-person.

    Thanks for mentioning some of my favorites: My Dearest Enemy; Sorcery and Cecilia; 84 Charing Cross; and Guernsey. Great topic, great podcast. 🙂

  14. Lora says:

    I loved Attachments, liked the Meg Cabot contemporaries with the email in them, but my favorite epistolary romance has to be Possession by AS Byatt. Wow. So powerful and intricately romantic. I think I underlined half of Randolph Henry Ash’s letters in that book…

  15. bev says:

    I loved Written in Red and can not wait for the third book to come out. It comes out the same day as the next Sebastian St Cyr and so will be a wonderful release day for me.
    I’ve never read the follow up to 84 Charing Cross Road and I was just at the library, darn.
    Finally read Rainbow Rowell this week. Read Eleanor & Park and then went straight to Attachments it was a great two days.

  16. I don’t usually like epistolary novels–the only one I’ve been able to get through was Dangerous Liaisons back in college.

    As for clergy in romance, Debbie Macomber wrote a book a while back about 3 women, who become nuns and then leave the Church over the course of the book. It takes place in the 60’s and covers the period of time slightly before and after Vatican II in 1965, which I thought was really interesting and made me wonder if some of the nuns in the Church actually went through the same emotions when those changes took effect. If I’m remembering correctly, two out of the three women do have love stories throughout the narrative. The title was Changing Habits. I’m not sure when it was published, but it was probably a good 10 years ago.

  17. Elizabeth says:

    I would have to second the recommendation for A.S. Byatt’s Possession. If you can stick with it (I vaguely remember that is started slowly), it is really a lovely book. Another good one I remember is a Pride and Prejudice sequel “Letters From Pemberley” by Jane Dawkins. It is a lovely sequel that plays out exactly what you would expect to follow the first year in a style you would expect from the characters. Doesn’t really take more than a 2-3 hours to read.

  18. Leslie says:

    Three Weeks with Lady X by Eloisa James features a lovely letter exchange of letters between the H And h, written as she renovates his estate.

    A non-romance epistolary novel that I really enjoyed is “Ella Minnow Pea” by Mark Dunn. It is set on an island, who has as its native hero the man who invented the phrase “The quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog” that contains all the letters of the alphabet. As letters start falling off the statue commemorating him, the powers that be decide they should no longer be able to use those letters. The first letters to go are ones like “x” and “q” which are somewhat easy to work around, but towards the middle of the book they start to lose letters like “e” and things become increasingly complicated.

    Although the premise may sound slightly gimmicky, the story is well written, with an interesting story line and characters. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys epistolary novels.

    PS The title refers to one of the characters, Ella Minnow Pea, and if you say her name out loud you will discover her name relates to the letters in the middle of the alphabet “LMNOP”

  19. EC Spurlock says:

    There is a collection of Lucy Maud Montgomery short stories called “Across the Miles” which are all short stories involving letters. Most of them involve romance although not all of them do; but this is Montgomery so they are all great stories. (In fact, I have one of them in its original printing in one of the antique women’s magazines in my collection, dating from 1911.)

    For those of you who may be Montgomery fans, Dell brought out a series of collections of her short stories and novellas several years ago, which are collected by theme. They include the above about letters, “Along the Shore” which are stories about the sea, “At the Altar” wedding stories, “Against the Odds” stories about hard-working young women overcoming difficulties, and “Among the Shadows”, spooky stories and stories about death. These are geared more toward adult readers so are very different from her YA books like “Anne of Green Gables”. I don’t know if they’re still available but might be worth seeking out.

  20. Amy Kathryn says:

    I really enjoyed Somewhere in France by Jennifer Robson and I’ll Be Seeing You by Suzanne Hayes which are set in 1914 and 1943 respectively. A modern take on Daddy Longlegs was Dear Mr. Knightley by Katherine Reay. Most of the others on my epistolary list at Goodreads have already been mentioned by others.

  21. Lora says:

    Across the Miles? How do I not know about this when Along the Shore was my favorite book growing up??? Must find now!

  22. Heather S says:

    I LOOOOOOVE “Almost Like Being In Love”! It’s got a permanent spot on my keeper shelf. It’s sweet, funny, romantic, and doesn’t have any of the “I want my ex back and I’ll destroy anyone who gets in my way! psycho” vibe. The change in character relationships occurs in a very organic, natural, and believable way, and the secondary characters are as good as our heroes!

  23. Ezri says:

    It’s not entirely epistolatory but Victoria Connelly’s “A Weekend With Mr. Darcy” is really great – the premise of the book is a University professor who is sharing a lovely correspondence with her favorite romance author, without knowing that ‘Lorna’ is really Warwick. Hijinks ensue 🙂 The book does feature the letters between Lorna and Warwick so you get to see how the friendship begins.

  24. Laura Brennan says:

    Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster isn’t quite a romance, but it does have romantic moments. It’s an epistolary (except for the first chapter) coming of age story about a bookish, orphan girl who unexpectedly gets to go to college around 1920. So funny and sweet! Her sequel, Dear Enemy, is quite different but also entirely in letters. And, together, the two books helped transform American orphanages – she had quite a reach!

  25. Dena H. says:

    Anne Bishop’s The Others series is amazing! I always read her books with trepidation because she can be fantastic or really disappointing (i.e. the Ephemera series) but these books are so good that they have shot to the top of my urban fantasy :best of” list (along with Kelley Armstrong, Tanya Huff, and Patricia Briggs). I have the prepub of Vision in Silver (book 3) sitting on my Kindle and I want to read it so badly and also I want to save it and savour it…

  26. Yvonne says:

    Nooo!!! I just started a Murder of Crows! Don’t tell me she kills off main characters?!? Not fair!!

    Although… they’re really good and I’ll keep reading them until they aren’t.

  27. EcigManBex says:

    E-cigarette is more better than tobacco, just try

    http://ikraz.biz/cat7/e-cigarettes-and-marijuana.php – e-cigarettes-and-marijuana

  28. Judy says:

    Hi, ladies. I’m new-ish to the genre and new to the podcast and blog, and just want to say you folks rock! So very enjoyable to spend time with you and let you weaken my impulse control even further. Love the podcast, but I’m really hard of hearing, and miss a lot. So a very heartfelt and sloppy thank-you to Garlic Knitter for her transcripts! You say they’re meticulous, and boy howdy, is that correct. Thanks so much, GK!

  29. SB Sarah says:

    @Judy:

    I’m so glad the transcripts are helpful and that you’re enjoying the podcast! Yay! If I can offer any recommendations, please feel free to email me any time.

  30. Elenaka says:

    Бесплатные объявления в Санкт-Петербурге и Ленинградской области. Размещение объявлений без регистрации в Санкт-Петербурге. Купить или продать в Санкт-Петербурге.
    Доска бесплатных объявлений Санкт-Петербурга, у нас Вы сможете разместить свои объявления на все случаи жизни…

Add Your Comment

Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

*


This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

↑ Back to Top