Letters in Films: Letter from an Unknown Woman - On the Power of Posthumous Letters

Letter from an Unknown Woman (Brief einer Unbekannten, 1948) is a film by Max Ophüls starring Joan Fontaine, based on a novella by Stefan Zweig.  The movie itself is excellent (I thank Dolores López for telling me about it) and was selected for preservation in the United States Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

The novella by Zweig has a beginning that would pull anyone in. It is the forty-first birthday of R., the famous novelist. He sits down to go through the mail and finds a letter – “more of a manuscript than a letter” – and he doesn’t recognize the sender. The remainder of the story, other than a brief coda, is that letter. Here is how it begins – signature Zweig: highly emotional and dramatic, yet gripping:

“My child died yesterday – for three days and three nights I wrestled with death for that tender little life, I sat for forty hours at his bedside while the influenza racked his poor, hot body with fever. I put cool compresses on his forehead, I held his restless little hands day and night.

On the third evening I collapsed. My eyes would not stay open any longer; I was unaware of it when they closed. I slept, sitting on my hard chair, for three or four hours, and in that time death took him.

Now the sweet boy lies there in his narrow child’s bed, just as he died; only his eyes have been closed, his clever, dark eyes, and his hands are folded over his white shirt, while four candles burn at the corners of his bed. I dare not look, I dare not stir from my chair, for when the candles flicker, shadows flit over his face and his closed mouth, and then it seems as if his features were moving, so that I might think he was not dead after all, and will wake up and say something loving and childish to me in his clear voice”.