This project investigates the intersections between time and emotion via the exchange of letters in the eighteenth-century epistolary novel. Those intersections, creating what I call pathetic temporality, include attention within works to how long it takes for letters to reach their recipients, how correspondents understand the passing of time when their emotional state affects their perceptions of time, and the importance of time as a rhetorical device in what is written by correspondents. Drawing on both affect theory and theories of time and temporality, I briefly consider the implications of temporality in Aphra Behns Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister and Eliza Haywoods Love-Letters on All Occasions. I then engage the ways in which Richardsons Pamela simultaneously utilizes and revises the forms of affect and temporality that appear in these earlier texts. Richardsons titular character immerses her reader in the possibilities for the expression of emotion through the concrete temporality of days, hours, and minutes, tying her emotional state to the passage of time. This represents a shift in the interactions of affect and time that Behn and Haywood produce, and influences the epistolary novels that come after Pamela. I argue that women writers like Frances Sheridan, Frances Brooke, Charlotte Lennox, and Charlotte Smith reimagine Pamelas epistolary temporality as both fluid and crucial to the interactions between people. The epistolary novels structure is a space in which the necessary separation of characters produces and expands the passing of time between events, and combines with the genres (necessary) use of the first person point of view that can and often must alternate between characters. This narrative form makes the epistolary novel a particularly forceful space to shape emergent connections between understandings of time and the emotions. To conclude, I consider how the failure of the epistolary structure in the nineteenth-century descendants of these texts, such as Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, emphasize the shift in narrative structures of both affect and temporality that lead toward the more dominant narrative construction of free indirect discourse, even as the vestiges of epistolarity remain in later novels.