Letter from an Unknown Woman

A successful writer comes home on his birthday to a long letter from a woman he cannot place. Over the course of it she describes loving him since childhood, the three occasions they spent together, and the fact that he never once recognised her as the same person. The letter is written after their child has died, and she is dying too.

Zweig is one of the great miniaturists of obsession, and the novella's cruelty is structural rather than dramatic: nothing villainous happens, the man is merely careless, and carelessness turns out to be enough to consume an entire life. Everything is filtered through her account, which leaves an unsettling amount of room to wonder how much of him she ever actually knew.

Max Ophüls filmed it in 1948 and it remains one of the better literary adaptations — though the novella's ending is colder than the film's.