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Summary
Summary
Miss Emily "Fido" Faithfull is a "woman of business" and a spinster pioneer in the British women's movement, independent of mind but naively trusting of heart. Distracted from her cause by the sudden return of her once-dear friend, the unhappily wed Helen Codrington, Fido is swept up in the intimate details of Helen's failing marriage and obsessive affair with a young army officer. What begins as a loyal effort to help a friend explodes into a courtroom drama that rivals the Clinton affair --complete with stained clothing, accusations of adultery, counterclaims of rape, and a mysterious letter that could destroy more than one life.
Based on a scandalous divorce case that gripped England in 1864, The Sealed Letter is a riveting, provocative drama of friends, lovers, and divorce, Victorian style.
Author Notes
Emma Donoghue was born on October 24, 1969 in Dublin, Ireland. She received her BA degree from the University College Dublin and PhD in English from University of Cambridge. Her first novel was Stir. Her next novel was Hood which won the 1997 American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Book Award for Literature. Her novel Slammerkin was a finalist in the 2001 Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Fiction. The Sealed Letter, published in 2008, is a work of historical fiction. This work was the joint winner of the 2009 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. She continued writing several award winning novels including Room which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in September 2010. Some of her other works include Astray, Three and a Half Deaths, and Frog Music.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. In 1864 London, after a separation of seven years, Helen, now the wife of Vice-Admiral Codrington, bumps into her old friend Emily Faithful, now a well-known feminist and independent printer. As Donoghue (Slammerkin) deliciously unspools the twisted roots of their intimacy, Emily soon finds herself party to Helen's clandestine affair and snared in the sensational divorce proceedings that ensue (and which are based on an actual case from the period). Donoghue's elegantly styled, richly woven tale absorbs the everyday lives of Victorian women (rich, poor, working, home-bound, feminist, adulteress) and men (officer, lawyer, minister, adulterer, even an amateur detective) in a colorful tapestry of spiraling intrigue, innuendo, speculation and mystery. Characters indulge in pleasures at which Victorian novels could only hint, and which Donoghue renders with aplomb. Period details--etiquette, typesetting, dress, medical treatments, public amusements, shipping and jurisprudence--are rendered with a spare exactitude organic to the story. Donoghue's latest has style and scandal to burn. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Spinster Emily Faithfull is a rarity in Victorian England the successful owner of a printing press and a leader in the fledgling British women's movement. But she's also naive and overly trusting (her nickname, Fido, says it all), especially when it comes to her vibrant, beautiful, and unhappily married friend Helen Codrington. After an absence of several years, during which Admiral Codrington is posted to Malta, the Codringtons have returned, and Fido finds herself entangled once again in their domestic troubles. This time, the troubles lead to a scandalous divorce case that destroys Fido's illusions and threatens nearly everything she has achieved. The versatile Donoghue, author of Slammerkin (2001) and Life Mask (2004), among other works, delivers a complex and well-executed tale based on actual people and events, drawing from newspaper accounts, legal documents, and personal papers. Readers may find themselves skimming through the chapters detailing Codrington v. Codrington, and growing impatient with Fido, but every detail of the Victorian milieu, from the private to the public realms, is just right.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A novel about an admiral, his unfaithful wife and her activist friend. POP culture's fascination with Hollywood divorces Tom and Nicole, Denise and Charlie, Pamela and the man of the moment - pales when compared with the excitement almost any divorce stirred in Victorian England. So it is in Emma Donoghue's cozily lurid new novel, "The Sealed Letter," which tells a story all the more remarkable for being based on an actual case involving an admiral, his beautiful young wife and a prominent activist for women's suffrage. Helen Codrington is the wayward wife, Harry the strait-laced older husband to whom she's long refused sexual "rights." Returning to London after a stint abroad, Helen renews her acquaintance with Emily Faithfull, known as Fido, and hopes to use her old friend's house for illicit trysts. The women share a love of sensational novels and Dickens; they used to share a bed, too, when Fido's asthma attacks (normally soothed with a good cigarette) required Helen's attention. Idealistic to the point of naivete, homely Fido believes ardently in women's rights and has opened a printing shop that employs female typesetters. But she doesn't necessarily believe in adultery. When she hears Helen and a naval officer going at it on her sofa - the springs emit a "frantic squeak" - she's both fascinated and repulsed, reluctant to be drawn into this tawdry affair. Too late. One great lesson of "The Sealed Letter" is that "every friend one makes in life is a liability: ... one must keep her as a friend forever or she'll become an enemy." In the autumn of 1864, as letters fly back and forth between Fido, Helen and Helen's lover, Harry instigates divorce proceedings. As of 1857, the relaxation of certain laws significantly increased the number of English divorces, but the courts still refused to allow petitioners, respondents or even corespondents to speak on their own behalf. Thus Harry must put his trust in a handful of witnesses and knit together a case from circumstantial evidence - a stained dress, a missed telegram, Helen's visits to Fido's house and to a hotel. All this would be scandal enough, but Helen decides to fight back. And to further her cause, she reminds her friend of an "unspeakable" incident: One night when the two women were sleeping in Fido's bed, Harry attempted to rape Fido. Horrified - could she have repressed this memory? She had, after all, taken laudanum for her asthma - Fido agrees to file an affidavit attesting to its veracity, then runs away when she learns her statement will be made public. Donoghue neatly delivers the twists expected of courtroom drama, even up to the frisson-inducing final page. The game of claim and counterclaim leads the combatants to a sealed letter, backdated to the time of Fido's stay with the Codringtons, in which Harry expresses doubts about the nature of the women's relationship. This suggestion comes as no surprise to the reader, who has long since diagnosed Fido's feelings for Helen, but the threat of exposure is awful enough to shock her out of hiding and onto the witness stand. On whose behalf does she testify? Will the letter be unsealed and read aloud? And what exactly does it say? Helen isn't the only one on the edge of her seat. Heterosexual monogamy may have been the bedrock of Victorian society, but the public (then as now) watched eagerly when a marriage crumbled: "That's the devil of publicity," Harry thinks, "an airing of any kind only feeds the flame." Headlines draw spectators to the courtroom, and public opinion ensures that the results will be devastating, no matter what verdict is reached. Helen is easily branded an adulteress and Fido a "panderess"; Harry watches his daughters for signs of nymphomania. Saboteurs break into Fido's printing press, and the women of the suffrage movement begin coolly to detach her from the organization. As with Donoghue's previous novels "Slammerkin" and "Life Mask," the plot is psychologically informed, fast paced and eminently readable (it compresses the timeline of actual events). Yet some narrative elements borrow too much from the 19th century. Exposition often comes packaged in dialogue, where it sounds artificial: when Fido discourses on politics or the printing press, she might be speaking to a lecture hall. Donoghue also sprinkles metaphor and simile as liberally as Helen might use face powder. On one page alone, memories billow up "like genii," words make a "log-jam" in Fido's throat and "years fall away like planks splintering." Figuration may have been a technique dear to Victorian hearts, but it can tire a contemporary ear, which might then miss the simple strength of lines like "a surge of loathing so pure it reminds him of desire." Good lines there are in abundance. And in the end, "The Sealed Letter" provides both the titillating entertainment readers like Helen and Fido crave and the more sober exploration of truth, commitment and betrayal Harry might appreciate. Donoghue's sympathy for all three of her central characters emerges through intimate narration and lifts the novel out of the tabloid muck, despite the public shaming Harry, Helen and Fido experience. There is, as Fido puts it, "so much to say, and little of it speakable." Susann Cokal, whose most recent novel is "Breath and Bones," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Guardian Review
Fans of Emma Donoghue's Man Booker-shortlisted Room should be warned that The Sealed Letter is cut from a very different cloth. Room was what is known to the publishing trade as a "breakout book", that change-of-direction novel in which a writer swaps a specialist niche for the blandishments of the mass audience. Donoghue's specialist niche was the artful historical recreation, most notably 2000's Slammerkin. The Sealed Letter, first published in Canada in 2008, turns out to be a divorce-court romp set in 1864, based on the real-life travails of the celebrated Vice-Admiral Henry Codrington and his rackety and impulsive wife. We first glimpse Helen Codrington, a lickerish 36-year-old with a manner to match, on a hot August afternoon in London's Farringdon Street with "something rancid" borne on the breeze from Smithfield meat market. She is re-encountering her erstwhile friend, Emily "Fido" Faithfull. Miss Faithfull, previously a rapt attendant on the Codrington menage but not seen for seven years, has now reinvented herself as a pillar of the burgeoning women's movement. She is the proprietor of her own printing press and, when not correcting the proofs of such austere publications as Friendless Girls and How to Help Them, can be found smoking cigarettes in the seclusion of her bedchamber. If Miss Faithfull is an interesting early example of the New Woman, and her printing firm a prototype for the employment bureau staffed by Rhoda Nunn in Gissing's The Odd Women (1893), then her older friend is merely a symbol of the world that Fido and her high-minded chums on the English Woman's Journal are trying to change: a duplicitous flibbertigibbet, bored with her nautical husband, and occupying her time both in Malta, from which the admiral has just returned on furlough, and London with admirers. The latest of these gentlemen friends, a Colonel Anderson, hangs on her arm in Farringdon Street; and Miss F is greatly distressed, a chapter or two later, when she hears them noisily committing adultery on her drawing room sofa. Although what follows soon declares itself as a Victorian court procedural, with its shifty-eyed evidence collectors and unwelcome surprises at the witness box, Donoghue's real interest lies in the relationship between her two central characters. There are scandalised references to "the incident" - a central plank in Helen's somewhat hopeful defence - in which Henry is supposed to have entered a bed occupied by his wife and her friend with the aim of establishing what the old lawyer Mr Few calls a "connection" with the latter. Fido, at first highly supportive, but then imagining herself manipulated and made a fool of, eventually flees the coop and returns for cross-examination with some very different objectives in mind. Briskly written, deftly plotted and nicely ironic, The Sealed Letter falters only in the absolute gratuitousness of some of its period detail. Naturally one wants a mock-Victorian novel to sound authentic. Donoghue's characters, alas, have a habit of declaring their authenticity by way of stagy advertisements. Thus the conversation between Helen and Fido about their current library lists is only incidentally a comment on their respective temperaments: its real purpose is to demonstrate just how thoroughly the author has done her research. The same point could be made of Fido's decision to travel in a "growler", which allows Donoghue to alert us to the contrast between a four-wheeler ("which could bear a whole family") and "a low-slung hansom meant for two". Some of the slang, too, looks a touch anachronistic. "Deb" is at least 60 years before its time. And would a well-bred woman of the 1860s talk about someone "walking out" of their marriage? None of this in the least detracts from the bounce and sparkle of The Sealed Letter's narrative line. In any case, Donoghue's real difficulty has nothing to do with her over-egging of the historical pudding. It lies in whether the vast new audience she attracted with her last novel can be persuaded to admire the very different kind of books with which she made her reputation. My hunch is that the Amazon reviewers will be furious. DJ Taylor's Derby Day is published by Chatto & Windus. To order The Sealed Letter for pounds 13.59 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - DJ Taylor Briskly written, deftly plotted and nicely ironic, The Sealed Letter falters only in the absolute gratuitousness of some of its period detail. Naturally one wants a mock-Victorian novel to sound authentic. [Emma Donoghue]'s characters, alas, have a habit of declaring their authenticity by way of stagy advertisements. Thus the conversation between [Helen Codrington] and Fido about their current library lists is only incidentally a comment on their respective temperaments: its real purpose is to demonstrate just how thoroughly the author has done her research. The same point could be made of Fido's decision to travel in a "growler", which allows Donoghue to alert us to the contrast between a four-wheeler ("which could bear a whole family") and "a low-slung hansom meant for two". - DJ Taylor.
Kirkus Review
In her third historical novel, Donoghue (Landing, 2007, etc.) portrays a sordid Victorian divorce that roiled the women's suffrage movement. Emily Faithfull, known to her friends as "Fido," thinks she's comfortably settled as the proprietor of the Victoria Press, which trains women as typesetters and printers, and as a respected member of England's nascent feminist leadership. But back into her life in the stifling London summer of 1864 comes the disruptive Helen Codrington, once Fido's most intimate friend, but absent for seven years in Malta, where Helen's husband was posted with the Royal Navy. The faltering Codrington marriage created an awkward breach in their friendship, and Helen claims never to have received the letters Fido sent her in Malta. Readers, however, will know this is a crock long before embittered Vice-Admiral Harry Codrington tells her that Helen mockingly tossed aside the missives with a wisecrack about lonely spinsters. The fact that Fido is oblivious to her beloved friend's manipulative, scheming ways is only the most obvious problem with a sluggish tale possessing little of the deeply imagined period atmosphere of Life Mask (2004) and Slammerkin (2001), let alone the author's usual sharp observations. The carefully drawn characters are dreary, as is the narrative, despite Helen's adulterous trysts and Fido's unjust ostracism by her feminist comrades. Even the climactic trial, complete with sleazy lawyers making insinuations about lesbian amour, is curiously flat. We would feel sorrier for Fido if she weren't so clearly self-deluded, and the adulterous Helen is a particularly uninteresting villain. A last-minute revelation, apparently meant to be a bombshell, will come as no surprise to anyone who's been reading carefully, and the sealed letter of the title proves to be an irritating red herring. Taking off from real-life characters and actual historical events has energized the author in the past, but Donoghue is just going through the motions here. Uncharacteristically dull work from one of contemporary literature's most interesting and entertaining writers. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Too bad Miss Emily "Fido" Faithfull really is so devoted. Trying to help friend Helen, she gets tangled in a divorce case that gets nastier by the minute. Based on an 1864 scandal in Britain. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The last day of August, and the sky is the colour of hot ash. Something rancid wafts on the air from Smithfield Market; the air glitters with stone dust. She's swept down Farringdon Street in the slipstream of bowlers, top hats, baskets on porters' heads. A hand lights on her arm, a small, ungloved hand; the brown silk of her sleeve is caught between plump pink fingertips. She staggers, clamps her pocketbook to her ribs, but even as she's jerking away she can't help recognizing that hand. "Fido?" One syllable dipping down, the next swooping up, a familiar and jaunty music; the word skips across the years like a skimmed stone. Almost everyone calls her that now, but Helen was the first. Fido's eyes flick up to Helen's face: sharp cheekbones, chignon still copper. An acid lemon dress, white lace gloves scrunched in the other hand, the one that's not gripping Fido's sleeve. The human river has washed Fido sideways, now, into a scarlet-chested, brass-buttoned officer, who begs her pardon. "I knew it was you," cries Helen, holding her emerald parasol up to block the terrible sun. "Did you take me for a pickpocket?" she asks, a giggle in her throat. "Only for half a moment, Mrs. Codrington," she manages to say, licking her gritty lips. A flicker of pain across the pointed face. "Oh, Fido. Has it come to that?" "Helen, then," says Fido, and smiles despite herself. Despite the skin-tightening sensation of encountering a friend who is no longer one. Despite the memories that are billowing up like genii from smashed bottles. She wrenches a handkerchief from her jacket pocket and dabs at her forehead. The two women are blocking the traffic; an old man swerves around them, under a sandwich board that reads No Home Should Be Without One . "But how you've grown," Helen is marvelling. Fido looks down at the brown bulge of her bodice. "Too true." Pink fingers clap to the coral mouth. "You monster! Still the same talent for mistaking my meaning, or letting on that you do. Of course I meant you've grown up so." "It has been, what, seven years?" Her words are as stiff as tin soldiers. Checking her bonnet is straight, she becomes belatedly aware that the scarlet uniform she bumped into a minute ago is hovering, so she turns to see him off. "Oh, my manners," says Helen. "Miss Emily Faithfull--if I may--Colonel David Anderson, a friend of the family's from Malta." The colonel has dangling blond whiskers. Fido lets his fingers enclose hers. "Delighted," she says distractedly. " The Miss Faithfull?" She winces at the phrase. By his accent, he's a Scot. "Printer and Publisher to the Queen?" The man's well informed. Fido concedes a nod. "Her Majesty's been gracious enough to lend her name to our enterprise at the Victoria Press." She turns back to Helen. So much to say, and little of it speakable; words log-jam in her throat. "Are you and Captain Codrington home on leave, or--" "Forever and ever, amen," says Helen. That little twisted smile is so familiar to Fido that the years fall away like planks splintering under her feet. She feels dizzy; she fears she'll have to sink to her knees, right here in all the dusty clamour of London's City district. "Matter of fact, it's Vice-Admiral Codrington now," remarks Colonel Anderson. "Of course, of course, forgive me," Fido tells Helen. "I can't help thinking of him by the name he bore in the days . . ." The days when I knew him? When I knew you? But she's not that girl anymore. It's 1864: I'm almost thirty years old , she scolds herself. "Harry's been immured in paperwork for weeks, ever since our vile crossing from Malta," complains Helen, "so I've press-ganged the colonel into service as my parcel carrier today." "A keen volunteer, Mrs. C.," he corrects her, swinging two small packages on their strings. "I'll just pop across the road to pick up your whatsits, shall I?" "Curtain tassels, a dozen of the magenta," she reminds him. "That's the ticket." Tactful of the officer to absent himself , Fido thinks. But once she and Helen are alone, the discomfort rises between them like a paper screen. "Such heat" is all she manages. "It takes me back," says Helen pleasurably, twirling her fringed green parasol and tipping her chin up to catch the merciless light. Watching that face, Fido finds it hard to believe that this woman must be--count the years--thirty-six. "To Italy? Or do you mean India?" "Oh, both: my whole torrid youth!" "Was it . . . was it generally hot in Malta?" Helen's laugh comes out startlingly deep, like a sob. "So we're reduced to discussing the weather." Irritation boils in Fido's veins. "As it happens, I'm pressed for time today--" "Oh, yes, I was almost forgetting what a very important person you've become. The Miss Faithfull, philanthropist, pioneer!" Fido wants to take her by the lemon-lace-edged shoulders and shake her like a doll. "I prefer to call myself a woman of business." "I can quite see why I was dropped the moment I left the country," Helen rattles on, "considering how pressed for time you've been, what with all your valiant efforts on behalf of our downtrodden sex." Her mouth, Fido finds, is hanging open. "Whatever can you mean, dropped ?" A pretty shrug. "It needn't have been done with such brutal efficiency, need it?" Helen's dropped the mocking tone. "Friendships have their seasons, that's understood. But you might have let me down rather more gently, I suppose, after all we'd been through." Fido blinks dust out of her eyes. "It wasn't kind, that's all I'll say. Or womanly. It wasn't like you, like what I knew of your heart, or thought I did." "Stop." She holds up her white-gloved hand till it almost touches those rapid lips. Helen only speeds up. "You'd had your fill of me and Harry by the time we embarked for Malta, was that it? All at once sick to death of us and our bickerings?" Her eyes have the wet blue sheen of rain. "I know, I know, I quite see that we'd worn you out between us. But I must confess, when I found myself tossed aside like yesterday's newspaper--" "My dear." Fido almost barks it. "I find these accusations incongruous." Helen stares at her like a baby. "Must I remind you, I wrote twice to Admiralty House in Valetta and got not a word of reply to either?" "Nonsense!" Fido is bewildered. This is like one of those dreams in which one is caught up in an endless, illogical series of tasks. "Of course I wrote back," cries Helen. "From Malta?" "Of course from Malta! I was a stranger in a strange land; I needed a bosom friend more than ever. Whyever would I have left off writing? I poured out all my worries--" Fido breaks in. "When was this? What month?" "How should I recall, all these years later?" asks Helen reasonably. "But I know I replied as soon as I got your letter--the one and only letter I received from you when I was in Malta. I sent several long screeds, but on your side the correspondence simply dried up. You can't imagine my nervous excitement when a packet of post would arrive from England, and I'd rip it open--" Fido's chewing her lip; she tastes blood. "I did change my lodgings, that autumn," she concedes. "But still, your letters ought to have been sent on directly by the post office." "Lost at sea?" suggests Helen, frowning. "One of them, perhaps, but could the Continental mail really be so--" "Things do go astray." "What a very absurd--" Fido hears her voice rise pitifully, and breaks off. Scalding water behind her eyes. "I don't know what to say." Helen's smile is miserable. "Oh heavens, I see it all now. I should have tried again; I should have kept on writing, despite my mortified feelings." "No, I should! I thought--" She tries now to remember what she'd thought; what sense she'd made of it when Helen hadn't written back, that strange year when the Codringtons were posted abroad and Fido stayed alone in London, wondering what to make of herself. "I suppose I supposed . . . a chapter in your life had drawn to a close." "Dearest Fido! You're not the stuff of a chapter," Helen protests. "Several volumes, at least." Her brain's whirling under the hot, powdery sky. She doesn't want to cry, here on Farringdon Street, a matter of yards from her steam-printing office, where any passing clerk or hand might spot her. So Fido laughs instead. "Such an idiotic misunderstanding, like something out of Mozart. I couldn't be sorrier." "Nor I. These seven years have been an eternity!" What in another woman would strike Fido as hyperbole has in Helen Codrington always charmed her, somehow. The phrases are delivered with a sort of rueful merriment, as if by an actress who knows herself to be better than her part. She seizes Fido's wrists, squeezing tight enough that her bones shift under the humid cotton gloves. "And what are the odds that I'd happen across you again, not a fortnight after my return? Like a rose in this urban wilderness," she cries, dropping Fido's wrists to gesture across the crowded City. Copyright (c) 2008 by Emma Donoghue All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777. Excerpted from The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| I Prima Facie | p. 1 |
| II Feme Covert | p. 55 |
| III Reasonable Suspicion | p. 89 |
| IV Engagement | p. 105 |
| V Surveillance | p. 123 |
| VI Actus Reus | p. 149 |
| VII Desertion | p. 163 |
| VIII Mutatis Mutandis | p. 197 |
| IX Counterclaim | p. 219 |
| X Subpoena | p. 233 |
| XI Trial | p. 247 |
| XII Evidence | p. 285 |
| XIII Sabotage | p. 307 |
| XIV Contempt | p. 317 |
| XV Charge | p. 329 |
| XVI Witness | p. 337 |
| XVII Verdict | p. 363 |
| XVIII Feme Sole | p. 371 |
| Author's Note | p. 391 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 399 |
