Virginia Evans' Bestselling Novel "The Correspondence" Headed to the Big Screen
Virginia Evans' award-winning novel "The Correspondence" explores the life of 73-year-old Sibyl Van Antwerp through her letters. Winner of the 2026 Women's Prize, the book is being adapted into a film starring Jane Fonda.
Virginia Evans' award-winning novel "The Correspondence" follows Sibyl Van Antwerp, a 73-year-old retired lawyer who manages her life entirely through letters. The international bestseller, which won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2026, is now being adapted into a major motion picture starring Jane Fonda.
A Life Shaped by Letters
Every Monday around ten or ten-thirty in the morning, Sibyl Van Antwerp takes her cup of Irish Breakfast tea with milk and steps over to her writing desk. The bed is already made, the clean dishes are drying on a towel by the sink, the potted plants are watered, and the shelves are free of dust. With precise movements, she pulls her chair in closer and gazes out the window at the garden, the distant white triangular sails, the shimmering water, and the square villas along the riverbank in Annapolis.
She takes quiet satisfaction in straightening her stationery and the stack of books awaiting her continuous reading. She counts her stamps, checks the pile of unanswered mail, and glances at the locked drawer containing a letter she has been writing for years, yet never sent. Sibyl is a mother, a grandmother, a divorcee, and a retired legal professional. While these roles define her history, correspondence is her true way of life.
A Birthday Letter Across the Atlantic
In a letter dated June 2, 2012, addressed to her brother Felix Stone in France, Sibyl reflects on turning seventy-three. She notes that seventy-three is remarkably similar to seventy-two—marked by arthritis, constipation, and sleep troubles. She remarks wryly that she has finally stopped dyeing her hair.
"Thank you for the birthday card, the fountain pen, and the book, which I started reading the very day it arrived and finished today... As for my children, Bruce sent a store-bought strawberry cake—which I threw out because it tasted dreadful, though it surely cost a fortune—while Fiona called from London to announce she is designing a building in Sydney and will remain in Australia for a month."
Sibyl also mentions a minor automobile accident that left her Cadillac at the repair shop, reassuring her brother that it is nothing serious. In a separate, formal note written the same day to her neighbor Theodore Libeck, she politely thanks him for the white roses left on her porch and casually mentions returning home by taxi following the minor fender-bender.
From Page to Screen
Evans' deeply psychological epistolary novel captures the quiet complexities of aging, family estrangement, and unspoken grief. Its upcoming cinematic adaptation promises to bring Sibyl's meticulous, letter-bound world to a global audience, cementing its status as a modern literary classic.
