Letter from an Unknown Woman (German: Brief einer Unbekannten) was first published in 1922 as part of the collection Amok by Insel Verlag. It is the most famous of Zweig’s novellas and perhaps the purest expression of his lifelong subject: the intensity of feeling in people whose outward lives give no indication of the passions consuming them.
A famous novelist (unnamed, but clearly a Zweig self-portrait: charming, prolific, successful, emotionally shallow) receives a letter on the morning of his forty-first birthday. It is from a woman he does not know — or rather, from a woman he has met repeatedly without recognizing: she was the adolescent girl next door who fell desperately in love with him at thirteen; she was the young woman he seduced years later without connecting her to the child; she was the figure he encountered again still later and took to bed without realizing he had done so before. She bore his child. The child has just died. She is dying herself. She writes to tell him everything — knowing he will not remember.
The novella’s devastating power lies in the asymmetry: the woman’s life has been entirely organized around this man (every decision, every sacrifice, every joy and deprivation defined by her love for him), while for him she has been — at most — a pleasant evening, immediately forgotten. Zweig refuses to moralize: the novelist is not cruel, merely oblivious. His crime is not malice but the automatic narcissism of a man for whom women are interchangeable pleasures rather than individual consciousnesses.
Max Ophüls’s 1948 film adaptation (starring Joan Fontaine) is considered one of the finest literary adaptations in cinema. A Chinese adaptation by Xu Jinglei (2004) won the San Sebastián International Film Festival’s Golden Shell.
Collecting Letter from an Unknown Woman
First appearance in Amok (Insel Verlag, Leipzig, 1922): Cloth binding.
First English translation in Amok (Viking Press, New York, 1931): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- Insel Verlag first German edition of Amok (1922): $100–$300
- Viking first English edition (1931) in dust jacket: $50–$150
- Pushkin Press standalone edition (modern): $8–$15
Zweig’s most frequently adapted work. Its emotional directness makes it accessible to readers who find his longer works overly elaborate.