Omissions and additions: ethics and the epistolary writer

Contemporary creative epistolary writers can become confused when confronted with ethical issues relating to genre naming such as creative nonfiction; faction; autobiofiction, the nonfictional novel, ethnographic fiction and true fiction. These hybrid forms often do not require a human research ethics formal clearance, however, these stories must still show strong evidence of ethical interrogation. During the writing of the epistolary novel, Hens lay, people lie, many ethical issu·es emerged. The main four being: ethical treatment of people, my responsibility to myself as a writer, the contract between writer and reader and my responsibility to the novel. The connection between the ethical issues of women's writing and informal, creative forms of writing, such as diaries, journals and personal letters, will be the focus of this paper.