The private-and-confidential letter is a fiction belied by its social conventions.

Evidence

Most epistolary history dismissed that conceit long ago. As William Decker puts it, “Perhaps the most fundamental fiction of letter writing” is one that “assumes the existence of a certain confidentiality as its enabling condition,” one belied by the social conventions of the letter-writing form. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1518

Categorization

• XREF: Useful framing claim for treating Suze’s letters as managed self-presentation rather than unmediated testimony — core to epistemic-anxieties method.
• DEFINE: Defines the methodological premise that epistolary privacy is a socially conditioned fiction.