This paper makes the case that epistolary studies and networked approaches to literature share an important set of concerns. Moreover, the union of these two approaches has a natural application to a specific genre: epistolary novels. The study compares the
structure of networks in epistolary novels to the structure of correspondence in real-world networks such as the
Carlyle Letters
or the Enron Email Dataset. These real-world correspondence networks
provide a reference point against which to measure the correspondence networks in epistolary novels.