Virginia Evans wrote her winning novel in a closet — literally. She moved her husband's clothes out, moved her desk in, and over nine months in 2020 in a rented house in North Carolina, produced The Correspondent: a novel told entirely in letters, following 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp, a crotchety former legal attorney, across a whole life's worth of correspondence. She never expected it to be published. She was wrong. The Correspondent spent 32 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, won this year's Women's Prize for Fiction, and has a Lionsgate film adaptation in the pipeline with Jane Fonda attached to play Sybil. Richard Curtis — the man who made Four Weddings and a Funeral — showed up at the prize party to congratulate Evans. Notting Hill is her favourite film. She's going to have a cameo in the adaptation, 'walking a dog or something.' None of this happened overnight. Evans has been writing two hours a day, 5am to 7am, since she was 19. She completed seven full novels before The Correspondent. All unpublished. She sent letters to every literary agency in Manhattan at least once, then tried London, before Canadian agent Hilary McMahon recognised she 'had what it takes.' Even then, The Correspondent was a slow sell — months of silence, more rejections. 'Failure was my thing,' she says. 'And it was for a long time — until it wasn't.' She worked paycheck jobs alongside it: for a lawyer, a surgeon, as a barista, raising two children (Jack, now 13, and Mae, 10) without childcare, and at her lowest point was considering law school. The novel's form came from Helene Hanff's 1970 epistolary memoir 84 Charing Cross Road, which Evans read in a single day during lockdown and found so comforting she wished it had lasted longer. John Williams's 1965 novel Stoner was the other template — proof that an unremarkable life could be turned into quietly heartbreaking fiction. Sybil is explicitly in the lineage of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge: ornery, outspoken, a long-divorced mother of three. The new paperback cover apparently bears more than a passing resemblance to Strout's own covers — whether deliberate or not, it's honest signalling about the readership Evans is reaching for. Sybil's correspondence runs from her childhood friend Rosalie to a troubled teenager, a Syrian refugee, and real-life figures including Ann Patchett, Joan Didion, and George Lucas. The book is, Evans insists, about grief and disappointment — not just warmth. While writing it, the six-year-old son of close friends died. She asked his parents' permission to include him in the acknowledgments. His mother now messages Evans whenever she sees the book somewhere in the world: 'every time I see the book somewhere, I just think that these people also now know of his existence.' Evans made her novel's dead child, Gilbert, eight years old — the same age as her own son Jack at the time — after hearing Zadie Smith say you should write not just what you know but what you fear, because they are equally vivid. She took that advice seriously enough to make the fear concrete. Redemption is unfashionable in literary fiction right now, and Evans knew it. She worried it would count against The Correspondent. It didn't. The novel's hopefulness — its insistence on forgiveness alongside grief — appears to be precisely why it resonated so broadly. 'It says something really beautiful to me that so many people were willing to entertain my book,' she says. Evans turned 40 this month. She now writes full-time, in two-to-three hour stretches once the children are at school. She has a room of her own — 'a little porch.' She is well into a new novel, about making a movie. She still can't quite believe it.
