In the nineteenth century France, printed material was illustrated more and more with engravings depicting letters and various practices involving letter writing. Starting with a large set of these kinds of images, this paper examines how the literary cliché of the epistolary genre as feminine was treated. Two sources are explored: letter writing manuals and the engravings in the popular press. In the manuals (1830-1900), the educational project imposed the type of a “serious” writer, mostly a man represented in a convenient position and surrounded with functional tools. Nevertheless a few love scenes could appear as clear warnings against disorder and transgression. In the lithographies published by Gavarni in 1837-1839 and titled La Boîte aux lettres (the letter box), the double image, a copy of an actual text linked to a pleasant scene, made a mockery of the social life of the time through various social types (the poor student, the unskilled painter, the lost tourist, the tricky servant and so on). Relationships based on  seduction, duplicity, or ridicule were also made fun of. According to these representations, the women were not only placed on the fringes of the written culture but also in the core of the imagination, especially dealing with the love story.