… group of guests. […] The movement from the first half to the second half of Richardson’s novel is the movement from the privacy of the prison and the tête-à-tête to the world of society and the salon, the movement from private reading to … between writer and addressee(s) need to be constantly kept going. Yet, at the same time, letter-writing necessitates privacy, as Richardson explains when he writes to Sophia Westcomb: ‘the pen is jealous of company. It expects […] to …