How to work letters into a novel

I'm editing my historical fiction novel. The middle section of the book contains several letters back and forth between the two protagonists (POV alternates with each chapter). The two started falling in love, but then they have to be apart for a while. So the letters continue the getting-to-know-each-other process.

I've read books where letters are put in the text of a chapter with no preamble or reaction, as if they were a scene of their own. I've read others where letters are their own pseudo-chapter of their own. But neither of these feels quite right to me with my format. I feel like I need to show the characters' excitement and reactions to the letters, especially the first few.

What I did in my first and second drafts is incorporate the letters into the chapter, followed by the characters' reactions to the letters. As in, "Mary opened the letter from John. [Insert John's letter here.] Mary was sad/excited/whatever." (obviously, with more detail than that, but you get the idea.)

I varied the circumstances of the letter-reading and letter-reacting, so they're not so repetitive, but well ... they still are. I'm at a loss for how to fix it. Up to this point, I think the novel has built up steam pretty nicely (and my beta readers seem to agree), but this letter problem is causing a sag - or at least a big plateau - in the middle of the book. The betas haven't got to this point yet (still a few chapters back), and I'd like to have it fixed before I send it out to them.

Do you think it would be reasonable to set up the first few letters, and then let them stand alone later?

Any ideas? Even just suggestions of other books that contain several letters (but aren't entirely epistolary) would be very helpful, so I can check out some options. My mind is drawing a blank, and when I google, all I can come up with are epistolary novels.

*** Could you clarify how you did: I varied the circumstances of the letter-reading and letter-reacting, so they're not so repetitive?

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The characters have to retrieve the letters the same way every time, but sometimes I show them re-reading it later, so that I can change up the scenery, or have someone else around, which delays their reading of it, or show them sneaking away to re-read it when others aren't around, etc.

That way, I don't have the same scene over and over: "Mary went to the hiding place and found the letter. She went to her room and read it. [Insert letter] She felt [insert feeling here]."

On this edit, I'm trying to get away from showing as much reaction to the later letters. I realized every letter was getting a pretty similar reaction - "Yay! He/she really likes me! This is awesome! Oh wait, we can't be together right now. This sucks!" When I kept wanting to reuse the same phrases, I realized something wasn't right. (How many times do we need to hear about someone pressing a letter over her heart?)

I'm having a slightly easier time editing tonight, since I realized that, to a degree, the character's reaction will be obvious in the letter he/she writes in response.

You say the characters are having the same, repetitive type of reactions, which leads me to believe that the letters themselves might be repetitive?

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The letters themselves were somewhat repetitive in the first draft, and also tended to recount stuff we'd already heard in the letter writer's POV section. But now that's not really the case. I try to think of them like a facebook message thread or series of e-mails back and forth. Each new message takes a jumping off point from the last and goes on its own tangent, tells its own stories. There's always a smidge of romantic stuff, but it's mostly getting-to-know-more-about-each-other stuff. They range in length from one paragraph to one page or so.

But I'm glad some of you mentioned not including the whole letter and skipping some of the letters. I think I needed someone to give me permission to do that! I guess I thought that if I started out showing the whole letters, I had to keep doing it or it would seem weird or like cheating.

In the part I've been editing today, I let myself skip a whole week of back and forth letters with the sentence, "Recently, his letters had been short – sometimes only half a sheet of paper, neatly torn along a crease. He hinted that he was busy working on something, something I would like."

See, that's another problem of showing ALL the letters - they exchange them every couple of days, so I'm locked into a very slow time progression.

Perhaps if you approach it as *not* including the letters at all, and slowly adding in the ones that really count, it might help you get to the messages that really matter?

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Hmm, that could work. I'm thinking at the moment that I will include the full letters on the first exchange, then skim over a few, include excerpts from a few, and have the reading of some of them get interrupted, like you guys have suggested. Later on, I might include another full letter here and there, if they're short or particularly significant.

I re-read the letters with an extremely critical eye last night and discovered there are still redundancies lurking. As in, Boy describes something he's doing in his POV section, and then says it again to Girl in his letter. There's not much way to avoid it either, if I include the full letters, without cutting out action scenes, which I don't want to do because they're more interesting than the letters. So I think I'm settled on just showing excerpts, so I can leave out the boring stuff!

Thanks for the suggestions! I really feel it would be helpful to see real-world examples. I'm having trouble getting enough distance from mine to see if my changes are doing any good!