The Woman of Letters

The Woman of Letters

Love is a difficult matter. Many believe there are one person for everyone to whom you will spend the rest of your life with.  However, many fail to live up to the ideal and get separated or find a new partner. This leaves some to protect others from the same fate and broken illusion. A character with this broken illusion is depicted in Angela Readman’s short story “The Woman of Letters” form 2015. Through the use of inner monologue from a first-person narrator, Readman’s story illustrates how the such a character handles love lives.

The story takes place in a foreign land where few people understand the English language. Our protagonist makes a living of corresponding with men on the behalf of women in her village. The narrator’s outer character isn’t greatly depicted in the story, we don’t get any information concerning her look or age. However, the narrators inner character is described through her thoughts and words. Normally in a story where we have a first-person narrator the main characters feelings are well described but in this story, she in a way seem cynical, it is only by reading between the lines we get to know her.
Throughout the story the narrator “helps” people with their love lives. For the most part, she makes “a loose interpretation” (ll. 29) for her clients. Her interpretations are widely misguiding, and can come off as lying. She hides the men’s real intention, to spare their feelings. Halfway through the novel we hear she has been married before to a man that left her “the English language, a son and this house” (ll. 100), the man left and she a has heard that he has remarried.

This properly explains her actions towards the girls, she doesn’t want to burst their illusion of love. She is in her own way a very caring person.

We hear that Lily, a person from the village, wants to find a man abroad. She has created an online dating profile where she with the help of the narrator can chat with men. At Lily’s session, there is a message from a guy in New England, that seems very nice. Our protagonist decides to tell lily that he is only looking for a short term relationship, to make her available for her son Robin. This shows that she is very caring for her own family, but on other expense.

The narrator and her son lives in a house where they grow crops and sell the mother’s English skills. The son Robin is in love with the village girl lily and when she comes over the mother fences off men online so she doesn’t get married abroad. The narrator acts in the interest of the son, which shows that she loves him, and wants the best for him. But the relationship is more complicated, because in the end she states that a dream has to be “fulfilled, be watered down, break, so anther can begin” (ll.160). The quote is very ambiguous, she says that a dream has to be fulfilled but at the same time broken, so another can begin. This shows that after the husband left she has abandoned the idea that love last, and that it breaks an illusion so another dream can begin. This is way she lies to her son the same way she lies to lily be saying that love can take years and thereby letting their dream of love living. The relationship to her son is very protecting and loving, she lets him live in what she sees as a dream, but she can also see that she is misguiding him and it is meant to break.