Les Liaisons dangereuses is a French epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, first published in four volumes by Durand Neveu from March 23, 1782.
Illustration from 1796 edition
Illustration by Fragonard for Letter XLIV, 1796
An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of letters between the fictional characters of a narrative. The term is often extended to cover novels that intersperse documents of other kinds with the letters, most commonly diary entries and newspaper clippings, and sometimes considered to include novels composed of documents even if they do not include letters at all. More recently, epistolaries may include electronic documents such as recordings and radio, blog posts, and e-mails. The word epistolary is derived from Latin from the Greek word epistolē, meaning a letter (see epistle). This type of fiction is also sometimes known by the German term Briefroman or more generally as epistolary fiction.
Young Werther writes a letter after deciding upon his suicide, the climax of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther
Title page of Aphra Behn's early epistolary novel, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684)
Title page of the second edition of Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), a bestselling early epistolary novel