Elspeth is already married, and World War I has already begun.
They fall in love, but two things intervene. As a reader might guess, the letters bring the two closer and closer, both psychologically and emotionally. She answers, and soon the two are writing back and forth across the ocean. A young man from Illinois, receiving a book of her poems from a friend, writes her a fan letter.
Her novel centers on the correspondence between an isolated Scottish poet who lives on the Isle of Skye. Jessica Brockmole’s Letters from Skye is a welcome exception to the rule. Not so many authors write them anymore, and we read very few. As time passed, however, the epistolary novel has fallen out of favor. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, published in 1748, tells the story of a young woman’s seduction and betrayal Clarissa’s ‘letters’ cemented the popularity of the form. Somehow, a collection of letters seemed less aggressively fictional, more like a psychological bridge between nonfiction and the imagination. During the eighteenth century, when readers were still unsure whether or not the new genre of the novel was a legitimate literary form, epistolary novels were extremely well-received.
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