Postscript: Treasures and Pleasures

Abstract

This book has aimed to illustrate how writers manipulate the inherently metafictional aspects of epistolary forms, exploring some of the ways that, as Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn suggest, ‘the higher end of neo-Victorianism seeks to illuminate its own trickeries’.¹ Exposing such ‘trickeries’ reveals authorial polemic intersecting with unreliable narration in diary and letter forms as writers imaginatively retell the past. This is a project of reclamation and vision that Margaret Atwood explains:

All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past. And all must commit acts of larceny, or else of reclamation, depending on how you look at it. The dead may guard their treasure, but it’s useless treasure unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter into time once more — which means to enter the realm of the audience, the realm of the readers, the realm of change.²