Stevenson’s Correspondences: A Family History in Letters was first published by OUP in 1974, simultaneously with Travelling Behind Glass: Selected Poems 1963-1973, the first collection of her poems to be published in the UK. Correspondences traces the development of six generations of an imagined American family through thirty-one epistolary poems, prose notes, fragments from journals, and excerpts from a mythical Vermont newspaper, The Clearfield Enquirer. The earliest entry in the sequence of records is dated 1829, while the most recent is dated 1972, so that the narrative as a whole covers a period of almost 150 years. The overall structure of Stevenson’s work establishes a new kind of literary artefact, mixing poetry and prose, moving backwards and forwards in time, requiring the reader to make connections in the fragmented narrative of the family presented and,...
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Citation: Gordon, Ian. "Correspondences: a Family History in Letters". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 February 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=31601, accessed 09 June 2026.]
