Narrator and point of view

“The Woman of Letters” by Angela Readman is a first-person narration. The story is conveyed by a female narrator who is also a character in the short story.

The events are only presented from the narrator’s point of view which helps build her unreliability as we gradually find out that the narrator is a woman with very loose moral principles: “I don’t consider it a lie. Love needs a loose interpretation sometimes. I make the words of a 39-year-old Canadian something a 22-year-old village girl needs to hear.” (ll. 19-20)

At first, the narrator’s lies seem well-intended, but as the story progresses we realise that her lies are self-interested because she cuts off Lilly’s chance of finding a man overseas so that she can convince the girl to marry her son: “I study Lily’s dating profile and clic...