‘The Correspondent’ by Virginia Evans

Virginia Evans spent her adult life writing in her spare time, but never had much luck getting her work published. Then, at the age of thirty-nine, she finally got a publisher to some show interest, and this very accomplished epistolary novel was the result. It has, to date, sold many hundreds of thousands of copies and also won the Women’s Prize for Fiction earlier in 2026. Quite a debut.

I was totally charmed from the first few pages. The story is told entirely in the form of letters and emails sent and received by its central protagonist – a woman in her seventies called Sybil van Antwerp. She lives in Maryland, has two children, an ex-husband, some good long-standing friends and a few pleasant neighbours. She is a great writer of letters, maintaining correspondence with dozens of people across the decade or over which this novel is set.

The structure allows a number of separate and intertwining stories to be told as Sybil negotiates the experience of aging in contemporary America. The narrative starts in 2012 and ends just before the covid pandemic, so it is all very contemporary. Some real world events are touched on – such as the rise of Trump – but on the whole political stuff is downplayed. Instead, as readers, we are subtly invited to think about the implications of some of the key technological and social issues of our time - electronic communication, international migration, racial discrimination, corporate rules and bureaucracy.

Sybil still has various ambitions still to fulfil and has deteriorating sight that she knows will at some stage soon prevent her from reading and writing, which are her chief occupations. She was adopted as an infant and is curious, through DNA testing, to establish something of her biological ancestry. She loves to write to famous authors, and often gets replies, is keen to do some voluntary work in her local university English department, and has a patchy relationship with her daughter.

As the novel proceeds, we gradually learn more and more about Sybil’s past life – her career, her relationships and, eventually, a personal tragedy with which she has never really come to terms. The epistolary form works particularly well here. We piece Sybil together from what she chooses to reveal to different people, and from what their replies reveal about her. Virginia Evans is particularly good at inhabiting the body and mind of a woman in her seventies who is being forced to reckon with declining health and the realities of ageing.

Sybil is not in any way an exceptional person and so it is very easy to relate to her. She is neither a heroine, nor a villainess, just a fairly ordinary middle class lady who has strengths and weaknesses of character like we all do. She has done plenty of good in her life and continues to do so, but has also made misjudgements and so has regrets that she looks to atone for via her letters.

Nor is Sybil always entirely likeable. She can be stubborn, judgmental and rather exasperating, and some of her difficulties with other people are at least partly of her own making. But this only makes her feel more convincingly human. There is also a rather sweet romantic triangle running quietly through the novel, which I will not say too much about for fear of spoiling it. Suffice it to say that it is handled with great warmth and humour and reaches an ending that I found moving and satisfying. It is another of the many ways in which Virginia Evans refuses to treat old age simply as a period of decline in her book.

I found it quite impossible to stop reading for a minute in the final quarter or so, and I would defy anyone not, at the very least, to feel tears welling up, if not spilling out, when getting to the denouement.

This is an original, absorbing and splendidly written book. Highly recommended.