Role that Love plays in A Letter From an Unknown Woman

Student’s Name
Professor’s Name
Institution
Course
Date
The Role that Love plays in A Letter From an Unknown Woman and one of the other short stories by Zweig
In the stories, A Letter from an Unknown Woman, A Story Told in Twilight, The Debt Paid Late, and Forgotten Dreams, by Stefan Zweig, love plays a vital role as one of the predominant themes. With specific reference to A Letter from an Unknown Woman and A Story Told in Twilight, the stories center on the theme of the power of first love. There are different, but intriguing, contexts in which the encounter between the individuals creates a romantic love attraction, how the feelings mutually develop, and the fate of the relationship.
The Power of First Love in “A Letter from an Unknown Woman”
In “A Letter from Unknown Woman,” the power of first love is evident as a woman, dying of flu, sends a letter to the one and only man she confesses as having had loved all her entire life, a man who surprisingly would not know or recognize her from a stranger should she be in the street. The woman warns that should the man receive the letter, then it means she is dead, otherwise, the letter would irrevocably be torn up. The woman describes the first time the two met was when she was still merely a young girl aged 13 years. The second time they met was when she was aged 18 years. The final time they met was several years later when the man was unable to recognize her, and he would occasionally pay for some evening of her time working as a prostitute (Zweig 61).
The woman tells her life story in the shadow of someone else, of a love she had been feeling about the man from the first time they met, but the love was unacknowledged, unrequited, and kept secret from the world with the exception of this time when writing the letter. The story provides readers with the opportunity of knowing the feeling of being obsessed and lovesick from the first love experience. The obsession and lovesickness that comes with the first love experience makes the women sit and think of all the letters that she wrote but never sent to the man. She also thinks of those letters that she never really meant to send in the first instance, instead wrote them pretending, hoping that she might find the nerve and braveness to go through with this experience anyway (Zweig 63).
A Letter from an Unknown Woman is thus written by Zweig from the lens that is intended to show the readers a world through the eyes of an individual who revels in the power of first love while at the same time suffering from the agony associated with the experience. The rambling coherent story of the unknown woman’s life breaks down the anatomy of a sick heart whose pain has been injected by the power of first love. The power of her first love for the man renders the woman lovesick through her entire life, though she only wants the man to know about her love for him only after she is dead. The situation compels her to make strange confessions by becoming preternaturally undressed but without being ashamed of her love for the man (Zweig 64). She describes in the letter how, while she was still a young girl, the first encounter with her beloved made her feel the single most unique warm glance t...