The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

Sybil Van Antwerp is an opinionated, forthright professional woman with a strong sense of what is right and proper. She takes her tea, sits at her desk, picks up a fresh sheet of paper and a pen, the day after her seventy-third birthday, to write a letter to her brother thanking him for his birthday gift of a book, and very appropriately, a pen.

She is a retired judge’s law clerk and long ago divorced, the mother of two adult children and a child who died tragically at the age of eight. And now, several times a week, in a ceremonial way, she sits down in her study and writes letters. 

She has written letters all her life. Sybil has always found letter-writing a useful tool for making sense of the world and muses that she leaves something of herself on the page, if anyone were ever to care to examine it.   

In her letters, Sybil grapples with many aspects of her life, both present and past, at a time when she was not expecting to face anything new. She is challenged to trace her birth family after a present of a DNA kit for Christmas creates pressure to investigate her background as an adoptee.

Letters also negotiate her reaction and responses to news of her ex-husband’s cancer,, and other letters address her fractured and distant relationship with her adult daughter. She looks back at a legal career working with a respected judge, her professional life and its relevance but also being confronted with the effects of a court case in which she was involved, one that upended another family.  She supports a friend and his troubled teenage son and deals with the attention of more than one suitor. She writes to authors, who sometimes reply, and to the university, seeking to be able to continue to sit in on university classes of interest to her.  

Over-arching all these concerns and percolating through the letters is the grief, guilt and confusion that haunts her after a tragedy that splintered her family when her children were young and the looming encroachment of old age, frailty and oncoming blindness. 

Made up of Sybil’s outward correspondence, though with significant replies and responses to balance the singular perspective, this is not a complete or continuous sequence of letters and occasionally emails. There are gaps and passages of time that require careful reading to connect the dots, but certainly, this is a worthwhile effort.  

Reading the letters she writes is an invitation to piece together a picture of Sybil, her personality, her past, her occupations, her opinions and her relationships .  The letters she sends and receives reveal a character who is both blunt and strong-minded, irritable when she is crossed or feels misunderstood, fearful and uncertain, but with a strong sense of justice and kind to those in pain and difficulty.  Sybil shows a capacity for reconciliation and grows towards some acceptance and peace as she ages.  But it is the unsent letters, the ones which she adds to over time but never posts and the draft that is scribbled over, never completed, that reveal the broken and unresolved aspects of her life. 

The Correspondent brings to life a quirky, flawed, but vulnerable individual who becomes as endearing to me, the reader, as she is to her family and friends.  Sybil Van Antwerp made me laugh, cringe, cry and think about things like old age, grief, regret, forgiveness, human connection, and I absolutely loved her. 

Review by Clare Lyon 

Penguin