Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) is a heavily-annotated orientalist epistolary novel. Many of the novel’s footnotes, which offer definitions of Hindi terms or refer to works of orientalist scholarship, interrupt the letters’ first sentences. Through this intersection of epistolary address with the footnotes’ direct address to the reader, Hamilton establishes the conceptual extremes of hypermediacy and immediacy that characterize this novel’s representative strategies. Hamilton’s notes and core text are linked through these structures of address as well as duplicated plots of education: as the eponymous Rajah learns about British culture in the main text, the British reader learns about Indian culture in the notes. I identify these duplicated plots as the origin of this novel’s much-discussed generic hybridity. Hamilton’s novel suggests that mediation offers, first, a way to reassess the hybrid novelistic forms of the Romantic period and, second, a new approach to literary orientalism.