About: A Bundle of Letters

"A Bundle of Letters" is a comic short story by Henry James, originally published in The Parisian magazine in 1879, which is also when the story takes place. The story is one of James' few ventures into epistolary fiction. As he did so often, especially in the early stages of his career, James made the tale part of his international theme: his letter-writers represent a number of different countries. Although some of the characters look like well-worn stereotypes — the wolfish Frenchman, the pedantic and aggressively nationalistic German, the snobbish upper-class English siblings — James manages to endow most of them with enough twists and turns of personality to interest the reader. One character has even been taken as a sly satire on himself.