From a Google Image Search – Amazon
Sybil Van Antwerp rarely leaves her home these days. She runs errands, goes for walks, goes to garden club meetings and tends her flower garden. She clerked for many years for a well-known judge. People always ask her why she was content to be a clerk to a great man, when she could have been great in her own right. She always reminds them that when she grew up women did not have all the options available to them now.
Sybil writes. She corresponds. She writes letters on the stationery she has used for decades. Sybil writes letters to friends, to favorite authors, to her best friend, Rosalie, to her brother Bruce, her son Felix (and her dead son Gilbert), to her daughter Fiona, and even to her ex-husband Daan. Rosalie and Sybil always end their letters to each other by telling what book they are reading. She has written to Joan Didion and Ann Patchett and has no compunctions about sending off missives to famous people. Guilt is an undercurrent in her letters, but, of course, guilt is an undercurrent in all our lives if we are older than twenty-five.
Sybil knows that she will soon be blind, which may be a reason she stays so close to home. She knows her property is desirable as it has a water view and is close to DC. She writes all her letters while she can still while sitting at a window that faces the water. She hasn’t told even some of her family members about the condition that will most certainly end in blindness.
The universe is a mysterious place. Just when you’re enjoying your daily routine, your rut, your hamster wheel, the universe sets things in motion that will bring change to your life. Sybil doesn’t shift gears easily but, in the end, there is information and there are people that get her out of her rut and allow her to embrace the very things that will make her life fuller.
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is a novel that consists completely of letters sent and received by Sybil. This cannot have been an easy novel to write and, unless it is based on real correspondence, required planning, consistency, a list of characters, and a coordinated timeline. Perhaps Virginia Evans will inspire you to become a correspondent, perhaps not. It doesn’t matter because the novel is well done and doesn’t make any demands on you to become a writer of letters.
So Many Books, Choose Wisely 