Plot
A rich and well-known writer, returning from one of many holidays to Vienna, finds a long letter from an unknown woman. As a teenager she had lived with her poor widowed mother in the same building and had fallen totally in love with both the opulent cultured lifestyle of her neighbour and the handsome charming man himself. This passion was not lessened by the flow of attractive women spending the night with him or by her being removed to Innsbruck when her mother remarried. At age 18 she returned to Vienna, took a job and tried to meet the writer. He did not recognise her and, without revealing her name, she succeeded in spending three nights with him before he disappeared on a holiday. Pregnant, she lost her job and had to give birth in a refuge for the indigent. Resolved that their child should have a good life, she spent nights with or became mistress of various rich men but would never marry because her heart belonged always to the writer. Out with a current lover, she saw the writer in a night club and went home with him instead. To him, she was just an agreeable companion for that night, as he again did not recognise her. In the 1918 flu pandemic, the child died and she, ill herself, wrote this letter to be posted after her death.
Read more about this topic: Letter From An Unknown Woman
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)