A novel told through letters offers an unusual kind of access. You hear a character speaking to someone specific, yet you may know things that the intended recipient has not learned. The envelope’s destination matters as much as the voice inside it.
The British Library’s record for Swinburne’s A Year’s Letters identifies an epistolary novel and describes its surviving draft. It is one example of the form; the reading exercise here can be used with many letter-based narratives without assuming that they all organise time in the same way.
Keep a small correspondence map
For each important letter, note sender, recipient and date, if supplied. Add a fourth field: what the sender appears to want from this person. An apology, request for money and private confession can describe the same event with very different emphases.
Use a fictional example. One character writes on Monday that a visit went well. On Thursday, another writes that the visitor left suddenly. Before calling either writer dishonest, ask what each witnessed, what happened between the dates and why they are writing now.
Read the missing reply
A long gap may create suspense, but the text must support any explanation you give it. A delayed reply, an omitted letter and a letter never sent are different narrative possibilities. Keep uncertainty visible in your notes until the novel resolves it.
Also notice how letters reach the reader. Is there an editor, collector or framing narrator? That arrangement can influence which documents appear and in what order. A fictional collection should not automatically be treated as a complete record of everything the characters said.
At the end of a chapter, summarise one change in what a recipient knows, rather than only what the reader knows. This small shift in attention makes the form easier to follow and reveals how intimacy, distance and delayed information can carry the plot.