The Epistolary art of Catherine the Great is the first study to analyse comprehensively the letters of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (r. 1762-1796) and to argue that they constitute a masterpiece of eighteenth-century epistolary writing.

Kelsey Rubin-Detlev traces Catherine's development as a letter-writer, her networking strategies and her image-making, demonstrating the centrality of ideas, literary experimentation and manipulation of material form to Catherine's epistolary practice. Through this, Rubin-Detlev illustrates how Catherine's letters reveal her full engagement with the Enlightenment and her original responses to the ideas of her century.

The letter was not merely a means by which the empress promoted Russia and its leader as European powers ; it was a literary genre through which Catherine expressed her identity as a member of the social, political and intellectual elite of her century.