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the aging writer sought to arrange his correspondence for future publication, describing a process of “archiving the self ” (159) by which Richardson, weakened by infirmity, worked to index his papers and bring them into order. Here the act of collating and preserving correspondence is at once a means of staving off death and of paying tribute to correspondents who have already departed, and Curran shows how Richardson prepared the letters he exchanged with the poet Thomas Edwards for circulation among a small group of friends after Edwards’s death. So while Richardson ultimately determined not to publish selections from his letters, partly out of regard for the privacy of his correspondents, he continued in his final years, as Curran shows, to grapple with questions that were “never fully resolved in his life: how to justify self-exposure against the charge of vanity, and how to make the uneasy transition from familiar to public communication” (188). Throughout, Curran develops a detailed portrayal of Richardson the correspondent that adds new dimension to the portrait we already have of the novelist. What emerges is a fuller and more integrated picture of the continuities running between the letters and the fiction, one in which Richardson’s correspondence becomes fundamental to the moral and aesthetic project of his novels. The book’s contributions, however, stretch well beyond Richardson and his work. Through illuminating new readings of archival materials and welcome attention to the literary features of the familiar letter, Samuel Richardson and the Art of Letter-Writing develops an approach to the literary culture of the mid-eighteenth-century that is alert to how that culture was meaningfully shaped by the letter’s material and formal features and also by the give-and-take of the epistolary relationship. By drawing out the communal nature of authorial self-fashioning, Curran makes an important intervention that should define discussions of mid-eighteenth-century literature for years to come.