The Coquette is an epistolary novel, or a novel composed of letters written by and to its main characters: Eliza writes to her female friends and receives letters from them in turn, while Mr. Sanford and Mr. Boyer relate their perspectives on the novel's events to their respective confidantes.
The epistolary novel was a relatively new form when Foster published The Coquette in 1797. One of the earliest examples of the epistolary novel in English is Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, published in 1684; earlier examples exist in French and Spanish. The form gained widespread popularity with the publication of Samuel Richardson's 1740 novel Pamela, the story of a young woman trying to preserve her virtue while being pursued by a libertine suitor. (Clarissa, a later epistolary novel by Richardson that explores similar themes, is referenced in The Coquette, suggesting that the book's characters and readers would have been familiar with the author's work.) By the time The Coquette appeared, epistolary novels had become ubiquitous in Western fiction, favored by European writers such as Frances Burney and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
By allowing characters to express their perspectives directly—and confess to feelings or deeds they might otherwise hide from the outside world—the epistolary novel can provide an intimate glimpse into protagonists' interior lives. At the same time, the reliance on fictional letters to tell a story can impose an additional barrier between the reader and the characters' experiences: in an epistolary novel, the author claims to represent not real events, but rather a representation of those events. In this sense, epistolary novels can sometimes seem artificial compared to other forms of writing.
