Acknowledgments.- List of Abbreviations.- Introduction: 'A Modern Wessex of the penny post'.- 1. 'The speaking age is passing away, to make room for the writing age': From Oral Tradition to Written Culture.- 2. 'Inconvenient old letters': Letters and Privacy in Hardy's Fiction.- 3. 'A more material existence than her own': Epistolary Selves in Hardy's Fiction.- 4. 'Never so nice in your real presence as you are in your letters': Letters and Desire in Jude the Obscure. 5.'A Story of to-day': Hardy's Postal Plots.- 6. 'Unopened and forgotten': Letters from the Margins.- 7. Epistolary Ghosts: Letters in Hardy's Poems and Shorter Fictions.- Conclusion, or the Profitable Reading of Letters.- Notes.- Bibliography.- Index.-