What The Correspondent taught me about faith, perseverance and God’s timing

A friend visited in January this year and left a copy of The Correspondent at my house. I’ve only just got round to reading it – and now I understand why so many people have been talking about it.

Virginia Evans’ debut novel, published by Penguin/Michael Joseph in the UK in April 2025, is unusual from the very first page. It is an epistolary novel, meaning the story is told through correspondence – letters and emails – rather than conventional chapters and narration.

We meet Sybil Van Antwerp, a woman in her seventies who has spent her life writing letters to friends, family, strangers, authors and people she admires. Slowly, through the correspondence she sends and receives, we piece together her life – its joys, regrets, griefs and secrets.

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But there is another story behind The Correspondent: Virginia Evans’ own.

But there is another story behind The Correspondent: Virginia Evans’ own. The book was published when Evans was 39, but it was very far from her first attempt at becoming a novelist. She began writing fiction at 19 and spent around two decades writing and rewriting. Before The Correspondent, she had written eight novels that remained unpublished. She has described those years of rejection and disappointment, often writing in the early hours before going to work.

Eventually, Evans and her husband made a remarkable decision. They uprooted their family, left their jobs and moved to Dublin so that she could study creative writing at Trinity College, where she studied under writers including Claire Keegan and Kevin Power. Even then, success didn’t come immediately.

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Evans has spoken about moments when she wondered whether she should continue writing. One source of encouragement came from her university professor Joan Frederick, who wrote the words “you have what it takes” on one of Evans’ papers.

And eventually The Correspondent found its way into the world. The book became a huge word-of-mouth success, reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold more than two million copies worldwide. It won the 2026 PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Novel and the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction. It is also being developed as a film, with Jane Fonda attached to star as Sybil.

After some research, I discovered that Virginia Evans is a Christian, although she hasn’t written The Correspondent as a Christian novel or set out to communicate a Christian message. Instead, she has spoken about the importance of writing what is true and allowing the story to be authentic. Yet her Christian faith is clearly part of how she understands her calling as a writer.

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In an interview with Wedgwood Circle, she spoke about her relationship with Christ and her sense of vocation. Reflecting on the platform she now has, she said: “I feel like I’ve been given a voice for a season. My job is to be faithful to it.”

She has also spoken about feeling that God has given her a particular moment and opportunity, and about wanting to use that opportunity well.

She has also spoken about feeling that God has given her a particular moment and opportunity, and about wanting to use that opportunity well. Rather than seeing success simply as something she has achieved through talent and perseverance, there is a sense of receiving it as a gift and recognising the responsibility that comes with it. 

We celebrate the breakthrough, the book deal, the bestseller list and the awards. But God is just as present in the hidden years – the years when the prayers seem unanswered, the work seems unnoticed and there is little evidence that anything is happening. Yet hidden does not mean wasted. Those eight unpublished novels were not necessarily wasted years. We don’t always get to see what God is doing while we are in the middle of it. At the end of her acknowledgements, Evans writes “James 1:17.” The verse says: “Every good and perfect gift is from above.” That is the only explicit Bible reference in the book, but knowing Evans’ story, it feels significant, because The Correspondent might look like an overnight success, but it isn’t. Behind it are around 20 years of writing. Seven unpublished novels. Rejection. Early mornings. Family sacrifices. Moving countries to study. Moments of doubt and a whole lot of keeping going when there was very little evidence that it would pay off.

And now she has sold millions of books.Perhaps that is the encouragement I took most from The Correspondent as a not very successful novelist myself. Sometimes what looks like an overnight success has actually been decades in the making. And sometimes the most important work God does in us happens when nobody else can see it. 

What are you working towards that you haven’t seen success in yet? What have you nearly given up on? Maybe you are in a hidden season right now. Maybe you can’t see the point of the waiting, the setbacks or the seemingly fruitless work. Keep going. Keep trusting. Hidden does not mean forgotten. You have no idea what God might be preparing through all those years that seem, right now, to be going nowhere.