“Sybil is a mother and grandmother, divorced, retired from a distinguished career in law, these things are all there around her. On Monday around ten or half past Sybil Van Antwerp sits down at her desk again. It is the correspondence that is her manner of living.”
Those are some lines from the preface to Virginia Evans’ wonderful novel The Correspondent. I loved this book. The story takes place from 2012-2022 and, through letters and emails, reveals the life of an intelligent woman whose loss of her young son estranged her from her husband and remaining children.
She was a lawyer who then left to clerk for a friend when he became a judge. She writes letters and emails several times a week. They are to family, friends, newspapers, a university president, authors, an awkward teenage boy in need of a mentor, and a family who suffered greatly because of her dealings in their law case.
This is such a clever and well done way to tell a story and fully flesh out a character. Also, as the book jacket says, this “is a gem of a novel about the power of finding solace in literature and connection with people we might never meet in person. It is about the hubris of youth and the wisdom of old age, and the mistakes and acts of kindness that occur during a lifetime.”
I recently came across a packet of letters I wrote to my parents while at college. It was such a fun and sometimes emotional way to relive those years. Email and text will never be the same as a well written letter.
If you too think it’s a shame that letter writing is a dying art, then you must read The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.
