Whatever happened to the epistolary novel? This is an innovative account of the disintegration of one of the principal narrative forms of the eighteenth century in favor of more authoritarian, third-person models designed to underwrite a new version of British national identity in the Napoleonic period. It offers provocative political readings of authors including Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott, Charles Maturin, William Hazlitt, and Lord Byron.