Epistolary Memory: Revisiting Traumas in Women's Writing (Critical Essay‪)‬

This article deals with two epistolary novels: Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Hanan al-Shaykh's Beirut Blues, showing the similarities between the two works from the formal/structural point of view as well as pointing out the function of the letter form and its symbolic significance in each. It tackles the confessional nature of the letters and the way they help the two protagonists in achieving a better understanding of their positions, even though the letters written by both protagonists are for the most part one-sided, and do not receive responses as in regular correspondence. Introduction