CAROLINE
I DON’T KNOW WHO invented the Letter Game (which I have heard called Persona Letters, or even Ghost Letters) but Ellen Kushner introduced it to me. I believe it originated as an acting exercise, one character writing a letter “in persona” to another.
The game has no rules, except that the players must never reveal their idea of the plot to one another. It helps to imply in the first letter why the two characters must write to each other and not meet in person.
The Letter Games I’ve played previously were usually a matter of two or three letters each, spaced about a month apart, during summer vacation. When it was time to return to school, we abandoned our characters in mid-intrigue, usually on the verge of a duel, a crime, or a coup d’état. Our letters were long on gossip and short on plot, but they provided good clean fun for the cost of a postage stamp.
PAT
Caroline first mentioned the Letter Game over the tea table, appropriately enough, in April of 1986. I was among the fascinated listeners who pumped her for more information, more directions, more details. I was intrigued by the possibilities and anxious to try it, so I badgered Caroline into agreeing to play, with the provision that I write the first letter. I dashed home at the end of the afternoon, full of enthusiasm.
As the opener of the letter exchange, I was responsible for choosing a setting, as well as for defining my own character. I decided on England just after the Napoleonic Wars, in an alternate universe in which magic really worked, just to spice things up a little. I knew Caroline shared my interest in both subjects, and I figured we would have a lot of fun working out a more detailed background as we went along. Little did I know what was in store!
CAROLINE
For the first few letters, things went quite calmly, with Pat writing as Cecelia and me writing as Kate, both of us having fun making up alternate history. Then, about the time Oliver disappeared at Vauxhall, I started to get a little obsessed with the game. A letter every few weeks wasn’t enough anymore. Luckily, Pat felt the same way. We began to exchange letters more frequently. Although we still didn’t reveal plot details, we met for lunch once a week and found ourselves discussing the characters as though they were members of our families. We were caught in a perfect balance between the desire to show off for each other and the desire to know how the story would come out. The day I knew this particular Letter Game had a life of its own was the day I came home to discover the latest letter from Cecelia tucked under my door. Written on the back was, “Don’t be too amazed. I sent it by one of the footmen.”
So the summer went, with Pat and me exchanging letters at every opportunity and driving our friends to the screaming point with gossip about the characters. (Never about the plot, I hasten to add.) I began to break china. Pat began to say things like, “We simply must do something!” without realizing it. We had fun.
The Letter Game ended around Labor Day. Pat and I took one entire Saturday to go through the letters and pull out loose ends that distracted from the story as it finally turned out. We sent the results off and we got lucky. We were able to publish the Game. But we didn’t play the Letter Game to publish it. We played because it was fun.
PAT
Caroline is entirely correct in saying we did not discuss plot with each other. In the interest of complete disclosure, however, I must confess that we did, to some extent, discuss timing. Specifically, sometime around the middle of August I asked her, “How many more letters is it going to take you to get rid of Miranda? I need to know so I can get rid of Sir Hilary pretty much at the same time.” She thought for a while and said, “Two or three, at most.” And she did. And that was the extent of the mutual planning we did.
When Caroline and I finally sat down with Kate and Cecy’s collected correspondence, we weren’t quite sure what we had (aside from a lot of fun). I don’t remember which of us was first to stare at the untidy heap of paper and say, “This is a book.” Looking at the letters with the sapient eyes of authors, rather than simply as correspondents, we could see places where the timing of events was wrong, important occurrences that were never explained, minor characters who had suddenly become important, and plot threads that had never gone anywhere. We set out to fix these problems.
Revising the letters was nearly as much fun as writing them in the first place. We argued happily about Georgy and Aunt Charlotte and Oliver. Caroline put in Thomas’s reminiscing about James’s career as A.D.C. to the Duke of Wellington; I retaliated with James’s comment about Thomas being mentioned in dispatches. Thomas got to snub Oliver in the park; James was badgered into expanding on Lady Jersey’s confused tale about Thomas’s brother, Edward. And so it went.
Eventually, we had to admit that we were finished and sent the manuscript off to the kind and farsighted editor who’d bought it. The finished version really isn’t very different from the letters we exchanged during that hectic six months; some things are clearer (we hope), and a few things were dropped. Here it is: We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.