After Decades of Failure: Virginia Evans' Journey to Literary Triumph
This year's Women's Prize winner, debut novelist Virginia Evans, shares her story of countless rejections and writing in a closet before 'The Correspondent' became a bestseller.
At a party in London on a drizzly evening, this year's Women's Prize winner, American debut novelist Virginia Evans, was interrupted by an admirer: filmmaker Richard Curtis. Her winning novel, 'The Correspondent,' a warm-hearted weepy with gentle humor, is prime material for a film adaptation, already in the works with Jane Fonda starring as the 73-year-old crotchety correspondent Sybil Van Antwerp.
Evans, who turned 40 this month, is no overnight success. She has been writing for two hours daily since age 19, completing seven unpublished novels before her breakthrough. 'Failure was my thing, and it was for a long time – until it wasn’t,' she says. After thousands of rejections and querying every literary agency in Manhattan at least once, she found Canadian agent Hilary McMahon, who believed in her talent.
The novel was written in a closet (after removing her husband's clothes) over nine months during the pandemic. It is entirely epistolary, inspired by Helene Hanff's '84 Charing Cross Road,' which Evans read in one sitting during lockdown. The book follows Sybil, a long-divorced mother of three, through letters addressing grief, late romance, betrayal, and gardening club rivalries.
Evans' writing process was deeply personal; she made the protagonist's son Gilbert the same age as her own son at the time of writing. 'I could only write that grief accurately by trying to get as close to the thing as I could,' she explains, citing Zadie Smith's advice to write what you fear. The success of 'The Correspondent,' which spent 32 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, has allowed Evans to write full-time. She now has a room of her own – a little porch – and is working on a new novel about making a movie, though she still doubts her achievement.
