Question

Read the following passage.

The epistolary novel, characterized by its reliance on a series of documents—usually letters—to drive its narrative, reached its zenith in the late eighteenth century. The form's defining appeal lay in its capacity for psychological immediacy; by granting readers unmediated access to a character's private correspondence, authors could cultivate an illusion of profound subjective intimacy.

However, by the mid-nineteenth century, the epistolary format had largely fallen out of favor, supplanted by the dominant mode of the omniscient third-person narrator. This transition was driven by several overlapping factors. A primary catalyst was the shifting ambition of the nineteenth-century novel itself. As Victorian society grew increasingly complex, novelists sought to capture a panoramic view of diverse social strata—a sweeping, objective breadth that the inherently restricted, singular lens of letter-writing struggled to accommodate.

Material and economic changes in the publishing industry also played a pivotal role. The transition toward serialized publication in periodicals heavily favored the chapter-based structure, which allowed authors to construct reliable, regular cliffhangers that the inherently erratic pacing of epistolary correspondence could not easily replicate. Furthermore, the advent of standardized, affordable postal rates in 1840 paradoxically eroded the dramatic tension of the form; as sending letters became a mundane, everyday logistical task for the masses, the act of letter-writing lost much of its romantic and revelatory aura.

While some early critics posited that the decline was primarily due to readers rejecting the extreme emotional sentimentality associated with eighteenth-century epistolary works, modern literary historians argue that it was ultimately these structural and material demands of nineteenth-century realism that rendered the form obsolete.

According to the passage, the author identifies all of the following as factors contributing to the decline of the epistolary novel in the nineteenth century EXCEPT which of the following?