The Letter (play)

The Letter
First edition (Heinemann 1927)
Date premiered	24 February 1927 (1927-02-24)[1]
Place premiered	Playhouse Theatre, London
Original language	English
Setting	A plantation in the Malay Peninsula, and Singapore

The Letter is a 1927 play by W. Somerset Maugham, dramatised from a short story that first appeared in his 1926 collection The Casuarina Tree. The story was inspired by the real-life Ethel Proudlock case which involved the wife of the headmaster of Victoria Institution in Kuala Lumpur who was convicted in a murder trial after shooting dead a male friend in April 1911. She was eventually pardoned.