The letters written to her by her brother John Stevenson in the 1820s, for example, help fill the gap left by the complete loss or destruction of anything she herself wrote before she was twenty. For instance, the five sparkling letters to Harriet Carr in 1831-32 bring the future author wonderfully to life about the time of her marriage. The late discovery of completely unsuspected letters to Barbara Fergusson sheds a flood of light upon the problematic relationship between Elizabeth Gaskell striving to be a perfect mistress and the governess whose treatment of her young daughters proved inadequate. There are many other examples to be assessed. We need not rely naively upon primary evidence nor defer to what Emerson called 'the solid angularity of facts'.
Personal letters resemble diaries, journals and autobiographical memoirs.
The very act of writing down and ordering experience provides models of self-construction, highly dependent upon those linguistic and rhetorical conventions that form part of the very fabric of our beings. In addition, even the most intimate of letters demonstrate a sense of audience. Relationships with correspondents are carefully tuned. There is a bewildering range of presented selves, a history of the author ever in process, growing like a tree. Letters can be also the crucible in which literature is created, as Gaskell's descriptions of her meetings with Charlotte Bronte make apparent, or even continue it, as those letters concerning Cranford and Cousin Phillis demonstrate.