Analyse af 'The Woman of Letters'

The short story “The Woman of Letters” is written by the author Angela Readmann and was published in 2015. Readmann is an English writer of poems and short stories, who has received many awards. The female narrator in “The Woman of Letters” is the only woman who can read, write and understand English in her area. It is an ability she uses to help other girls marry men from overseas. Sitting in front of her computer, she acts as a translator between May, who is a woman from her village, who works as a prostitute and a dancer, and a Canadian man. The protagonist helps these women to find the big love of their lives, all while she charges money from the women for her services although they do not have many money to live for. The protagonist own life is unfulfilled, she mourns the loss of her happy life and her marriage that she lost to a Russian woman.

The short story start in media res, which means we are being thrown straight into the short story. It all starts with our protagonist, who are about to right a letter for one of her girls to a man overseas. “It’s my job to make her, all of them, sound ripe for picking by a man overseas.” Here we get the first description about what she does for her clients. The middle of the short story is more about the way our protagonist does her job and on how her relationship is with her girls and her son Robin, which she got from her first marriage. Our protagonist is not doing her job like she tells her girls. She twists and turns what the girls wants her to write, and she isn’t truthful about what the men are replying to the girls. She tells all parts what they want to hear, just so everybody can get happy. “Onscreen, the man called Benji has replied. You look so hot in that new picture, I want to get you on all fours and… something that should not translate. ‘He wishes you were here’, I say, ‘he needs you like air’.”