Opinion
What a joy to see that Virginia Evans’ novel The Correspondent has won the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction. It’s a fine example of a very old form, the epistolary novel (a novel written partly or entirely through letters), and in this age of tweets, texts and emails, it reminds us that the handwritten letter is an art that doesn’t deserve to die.
Evans’ protagonist, Sybil Van Antwerp, is a reclusive woman in her seventies whose main occupation in life is writing letters. She is organised, diligent, intelligent and persistent. If you got a letter from Sybil, you would jolly well reply.
As we follow the story through Sybil’s letters, occasional emails and the replies she receives, the narrow focus on a solitary woman at her writing desk opens out onto a panorama of loved ones, friends, strangers and a mysterious enemy. Her letters allow her to communicate but also to withhold parts of herself. They are full of intimate yearnings that cannot be spoken, frustrations and loneliness, sardonic comments, and they gradually reveal an unresolved trauma in Sybil’s past. They can also be quirky and funny.
Epistolary novels have their origins way back in Ancient Greece, but the first work in English that uses letters in a big way is Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684-87) attributed to Aphra Behn. The eighteenth century was the form’s heyday, with novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Henry Fielding’s naughty satire Shamela, which turned the virtuous Pamela into a scheming and promiscuous minx.
The Victorians also loved epistolary novels: one of the best is Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a patchwork quilt of letters, journals, newspaper articles, ship’s logs and so on. We think of this vampire story as something ancient, mythic and Gothic, but Stoker was right up on the cutting edge of the age’s technology. He included messages from telegrams and dictation cylinders, wax tubes that could record voices.
More recently we’ve had Eva’s tragic letters to her husband in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, and Aravind Adiga’s Booker-winner The White Tiger, a long letter an Indian villager writes to the Chinese premier, telling the story of his ascent in a corrupt society.
In this age of tweets, texts and emails, it reminds us that the handwritten letter is an art that doesn’t deserve to die.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Anne Barrows, uses letters to explore resistance to the German occupation of Guernsey during World War Two. Ocean Vuong’s character writes lyrical letters to his mother in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. And I shall never forget Celie’s anguished and barely literate letters to God in Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple.
Epistolary works can get quite bizarre. George Saunders’ short story Fox 8 is a letter to us from a fox that has learned to speak “Yuman” and wants to understand our strange and destructive species.
This form is not easy to master. Done badly, we yawn our way through repetition and trivia. But done well, we can enjoy a double pleasure. First is the frisson, via a letter that knows more about the story than we do. Second is the “aha” moment that comes when we realise we know more about the story than the letter writer – and sometimes, indeed, we know more about the writer than the writer knows herself.
Letters and other pieces of writing come together like a jigsaw puzzle, filling in the background, propelling events forward and sustaining dramatic tension. When the last piece of writing drops into place, the picture is complete, and all the better because we’ve had to wait for it and have been thoroughly entertained along the way.
Jane Sullivan is a writer and literary journalist.
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Jane Sullivan is a books columnist and reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
