Dark brown calf binding with black tilte plate, gilt banding and title on the spine. Front hinge broken.

We provide an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

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Please view the photographs. A lovely rare book whose tale is modified by William Mudford. 

Letters from a Peruvian Woman (French: Lettres d’une Péruvienne) is a 1747 epistolary novel by Françoise de Graffigny. It tells the story of Zilia, a young Incan princess, who is abducted from the Temple of the Sun by the Spanish during the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. In a series of letters to her fiancé Aza, who is also the Sapa Inca, Zilia tells the story of her capture, her rescue by French sailors, her befriending of the captain Déterville and her introduction to French society.

An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of letters between the fictional characters of a narrative. The term is often extended to cover novels that intersperse other kinds of fictional document with the letters, most commonly diary entries and newspaper clippings, and sometimes considered to include novels composed of documents even if they do not include letters at all. More recently, epistolaries may include electronic documents such as recordings and radio, blog posts, and e-mails. The word epistolary is derived from Latin from the Greek word epistolē (ἐπιστολή), meaning a letter (see epistle). This type of fiction is also sometimes known by the German term Briefroman or more generally as epistolary fiction.

William Mudford (8 January 1782 – 10 March 1848) was a British writer, essayist, translator of literary works and journalist. He also wrote critical and philosophical essays and reviews. His 1829 novel The Five Nights of St. Albans: A Romance of the Sixteenth Century received a good review from John Gibson Lockhart, an achievement which was considered a rare distinction. Mudford also published short fictional stories which were featured in periodicals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Fraser’s Magazine, and Bentley’s Miscellany.

His short story “The Iron Shroud”, about an iron torture chamber which shrinks through mechanical action and eventually crushes the victim inside, was first published in August 1830 by Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and later republished separately in 1839 and 1840 with the subtitle “Italian Revenge”. Edgar Allan Poe is considered to have been influenced by “The Iron Shroud” when he wrote “The Pit and the Pendulum” having got his idea for the shrinking chamber from Mudford’s story. Mudford was born in London, where his father made a living as a shopkeeper in Piccadilly. He was influenced by John Milton, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, William Collins, Mark Akenside, Thomas Gray, and Oliver Goldsmith.