Recuperando la tradición femenina del género epistolar: el didactismo crítico de Fay Weldon en Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen

Abstract

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.