The Sealed Letter

From Publishers Weekly 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.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Spinster Emily Faithfull is a rarity in Victorian England—the successful owner of axa0printing 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 casexa0that destroys Fido’s illusions and threatensxa0nearly everything she has achieved. The versatile Donoghue, author of Slammerkin (2001)xa0and Life Mask (2004), among other works, delivers a complex and well-executedxa0tale 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,xa0and growing impatient with Fido, but everyxa0detail of the Victorian milieu, from the privatexa0to thexa0public realms, isxa0just right. --Mary Ellen Quinn PRAISE FOR EMMA DONOGHUE "Either Emma Donoghue spends most of her waking hours in musty library stacks or she lives a previous life in 18th-century England. She seems to inhabit the place. This is wonderful, soapy entertainment, but Donoghue infuses it with something more." —Houston Chronicle "Superb . . . Donoghue uses both the color of the period and its literary devices to create a rich, complex, and remarkably powerful story." —Elle "...A deliciously wicked little romp, complete with a clever twist at the end." (Mary Brennan The Seattle Times )[A] cozily lurid new novel. ( The International Herald Tribune 2008-10-11)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." ( The New York Times Book Review )Donoghue blends a true case and period detail into an intriguing tale of mystery and passion. ( The Oregonian )A fascinating tour de force, a brilliant unraveling of closely held secrets and brutal betrayals...A case of Dangerous Liaisons with yet another layer of Victorian outrage. ( Curled Up with a Good Book.com ) EMMA DONOGHUE is the author of five novels, including the bestselling Slammerkin and Life Mask . She lives in Canada with her family. From The Washington Post From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Sophie Gee The Sealed Letter is a Victorian romance and court-room drama based on a scandalous divorce case heard in London in 1864. The divorcing parties are Vice-Admiral Henry Codrington and his wife, Helen, who, during a seven-year posting in Malta, took as lovers several junior officers in Henry's regiment. The story opens when the Codringtons return to England (the adultery still a secret), and Helen meets an intimate friend from her past, Emily "Fido" Faithfull. She was a leading member of the British women's movement, proprietor of the Victoria Press and the publisher of the progressive English Woman's Journal and the Victoria Magazine. Emma Donoghue's triangle of real-life protagonists presents us with a quintessentially Victorian tableau: the lovely but fallen wife, the upstanding but severe husband and the repressed Bloomsbury bluestocking. When Helen bumps into Fido on Farringdon Street one hot August afternoon, we learn that Fido lived with Helen and Henry seven years ago, and that Henry asked Fido to leave when his marriage started disintegrating. Now Fido refuses to abet Helen in her latest affair, and so she and her lover are forced to meet in public places, and things with Henry unravel. The saga builds to a shameful, luridly detailed divorce trial, which Donoghue reconstructs from contemporary reports in the Times and other papers. Donoghue has written two other successful historical novels -- the critically acclaimed Life Mask and Slammerkin -- and it shows. She knows her way around a period drama. A ride on London's new underground railway, a visit to Fido's printing presses, descriptions of Victorian interiors, shops and streetscapes, all these details are absorbed into the narrative, and you barely notice they're there, except that mid-Victorian London feels so real you can almost taste it. You can certainly taste the vile tang of Fido's "Sweet Three" cigarettes, which she smokes alone in her bedroom: "The Turkish tobacco in its tube of yellow tissue smells sweetly spiced and nutty. . . . She draws the smoke deep into her raw lungs now, and feels her breathing ease at once." Solitary Female Pleasures, c. 1864. Donoghue does lots of other things well, too. Helen and Fido are a study in contrasts, but she draws out their unlikely psychological parallels. Helen is trapped by marriage, devoid of occupation. Divorce, for her, is unthinkable: It requires proof of overt sexual betrayal, violence or neglect. To escape from a Victorian marriage, Donoghue suggests, is no escape at all. Fido has the ostensible freedom of the working woman: She is financially secure, intellectually respected, invulnerable to the indignities of dependence. But she is filled with longing -- for emotional intimacy and physical closeness -- which makes her behave in ways that are neither likeable nor entirely honest. The deep-seated social prejudice against a woman like Fido is almost as damning as the criticism of Helen's social crimes. The title refers to a document that appears toward the end of the book: a sealed letter containing Henry Codrington's reflections on expelling Fido from his house seven years earlier. The letter aroused a storm of real-life curiosity and speculation when it was produced at the trial; Robert Browning gossiped to a friend that "the 'sealed letter' contained a charge I shall be excused from even hinting to you." The "charge," never explicit, is that Fido and Helen were lovers. Donoghue is masterful in handling the theme of Fido's possible erotic desire for Helen and Helen's manipulation of same. She depicts female sexual attraction as a complex threat, both enthralling and taboo. In Victorian England, she suggests, female adulterers and lesbians were equally dangerous beings. This convincing, troubled account of marital politics reminds us that George Eliot began writing Middlemarch, a masterpiece of unhappy marriages, a few years after the Codrington case was heard. Only one serious limitation encumbers The Sealed Letter: It's true. Donoghue builds the novel around the historical record skillfully and impressively, but history also constrains her ability to develop the characters and themes. This is the peril of writing "true" historical fiction, and in the end Donoghue's scruples take away from her powers as a novelist. Much as I admired the way she handled the constraints, I ended up wishing that she'd broken away from them to produce a freehand portrait of Victorian divorce, giving us villains and heroines to love and hate as much as real Victorian readers would have wanted. Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 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 © 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 Miffli... Read more