From the publisher’s description:
Kauffman looks at a neglected genre–the love letter written by literary heroines. Tracing the development of the genre from Ovid to the twentieth-century novel, she explores the important implications of these amatory discourses for an understanding of fictive representation in general.
Kauffman, Linda S. (NHC Fellow, 1983–84). Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. ISBN 0801418534.