The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans
Published April 2025 by Crown.
The Correspondent is an epistolary novel comprised of the letters written and received by Sybil van Antwerp mostly in the last ten years of her life. I first heard of the book in the summer, and immediately put a hold on it at the library. It was such a popular book it took months for the hold to be available. When I finally got the book I finished it in two days. I kept finding myself wanting to go back to the book to see what happens next, even though it is not a thriller or anything like that.
I thought the book was about a war correspondent, and mistakenly thought it was a series of letters written during the Vietnam war. I think I confused it with another best selling book called the Women, which takes place in the war.
I like epistolary novels. There is something interesting about finding something that someone wrote, and trying to figure out who it was that wrote the thing. It turns the usual format on its head a bit. The first part of the book the mystery is trying to figure out who these people are, and what is going on. There is no description of the protagonist and no direct conversations between characters. Instead it jumps straight into the deeper things that they are saying to each other. It takes some time to piece together who Sybil is, and what she means to the different people in her life.
This is a sweet book. Sybil is far from perfect, but she is given the grace to let her flaws be apparent and to learn and grow from them. She was able to become a practicing lawyer at a time that wasn’t the norm, but she also hit road blocks in her career due to the limitations of women in the field at the time. Her great professional success was of being a clerk to a judge.
She found professional success in a law career, but struggled with some of the closer relationships in her own family. She has warm pen pal relationships with strangers she has never met and many famous people, but has limited actual communication with her own adult children. She uses the act of writing as a form of communication that allows her to be direct and blunt, often skirting up to the edge of selfish or rude.She writes the letters to be close to people who are far away, but she also writes letters as a form of escapism from what is right in front of her.