Fay Weldon’s Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (1984)
is a collection of letters addressed to a niece in which the female narrator,
named Fay, tries to convince Alice of the significance of Jane
Austen’s novels. Considered as one of Weldon’s pieces of literary criticism,
this work has not received much critical attention. In this discussion
I should like to offer a more detailed exploration of Letters to
Alice, which reveals that it can be classified both as a novel that rewrites
the tradition of the epistolary genre, and as a critical work with
which the author develops her own theory about the art of writing and
reading; a double nature which is made explicit through the constant
transgression of the boundaries between fiction and reality.
