The Sealed Letter (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: Emma Donoghue, Miss Faithfull, Bessie Parkes (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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.)
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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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (September 22, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 015101549X
• ISBN-13: 978-0151015498
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #611,506 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Secrets, lies, and feminism , July 24, 2008

By	Rebecca Huston "telynor" (On the Banks of the Hudson) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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This review is from: The Sealed Letter (Hardcover)

This summer seems to be a time of novels for me. There's been a particular abundance of riches where historical settings have become popular again, and I have been eagerly reading my way along. Today's choice was a vivid, insightful story built around a Victorian scandal -- the divorce.

Nowadays, a divorce hardly seems to cause a ripple in our society, but in the nineteenth century, a divorce was a very public, very messy, and unpleasant experience. In her new novel, The Sealed Letter, author Emma Donoghue explores the impact of such a decision on one middle class family, through the eyes of the husband and wife, and their friend, Emily Faithfull.

Nicknamed 'Fido' as much for her character as her last name, Fido meets up with an old friend suddenly in a London street. It's been more than seven years since she's seen Helen Codrington, and in all that time Fido hasn't seen any communications from her. It's more than a surprise for Fido, it's a shock to see her old friend.

Helen hasn't changed a bit. Away with her husband in Malta, Helen is still the gay, charming woman that she has always been. She claims that she never recieved any of the letters that Fido has sent, blaming it on the wretched postal system of that distant island. And she seems to be eager to resume her friendship with Fido. Despite her misgivings Fido is glad to resume that friendship as well.

For Fido is unusual among women in Victorian London. She has remained single, working in the Cause of equal rights and opportunities for women in both the home and workplace. She has set up her own printing business, The Victoria Press, and has even been granted the distinction of a royal warrant.

Finally, there is Helen's husband, Henry Codrington, an admiral in the British navy. He's served with distinction in the Fleet, and now has been rotated home to a desk job. While he's chafing at not being able to serve aboard a ship, he's trying to make the best of it.

Through the thoughts, actions and letters of these three, the reader gets to have an intimate view of a Victorian marriage, where husband and wife were restricted by social norms, intimacy was rare, and especially reputation was considered important. Women had few rights, and many seem to be content with their lot, spending their days in social calls, raising their children, and charitable work. For Helen, her days are frivolous, spending too much money, avoiding her husband, and making attempts to be a mother to her two daughters. She makes choices that are impulsive at best, and one is about to bring her comfortable world to an end.

I don't want to reveal much more. I have to say that Donoghue's writing is wonderfully evocative of the period, filled with details of life for the well-to-do, the customs of the time, and most of all, the minds of three people in a very complicated relationship. All three of them are given very distinct voices and motivations and I found their story to be both compelling and heartbreaking. The author does what very few can manage -- make you both sympathetic to the plight they are in, and at the same time make you cringe at what they do and say.

Helen in particular is a very conflicted character, with behavior that infuriated me at times, and while I couldn't look away from the impeding doom, I did keep hoping that some sort of miracle would happen. As for Fido, she is an unusual heroine, very different than most subjects of historical fiction being not at all pretty, not looking for a life-partner, and having determination to find her own future -- on her terms.

There is one glaring error in this book, and as it is a technical one, not one in style or narrative, it's a minor one. The typeface used for the letters in the story is a very difficult one to read at first, rendered in a flowing, cursive font, with plenty of flourishes. Very pretty perhaps, and a nice conceit, but very hard to read at first.

For those readers who want to read something that focuses on a story that is revealing and entertaining, this is an excellent story. The author has an afterword that discloses a surprise, and one that I won't spoil -- you'll just have to find out for yourself.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning, beautifully written novel, September 11, 2008

By	K. Huff (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The Sealed Letter is another one of those books I just couldn't put down--and then felt bereft when I finally finished it. Set in London in 1864, the novel is loosely based on a scandalous divorce case, and features facts stranger than fiction: a stained dress (sound familiar?), fabricated evidence, and scandal more scandalous than the sensationalist novels of the period. It's a novel in which supposed friends turn against one another, in which servants even turn against those they serve.

Helen Codrington is a wife and mother, born and bred abroad, who craves some excitement in her life. Never thinking of what might happen, she embarks on an affair with Captain David Anderson. Late in the summer of 1864, Helen runs into her old friend Emily "Fido" Faithfull, a crusader for women's rights, who's surprisingly... conventional, all things considered. When Harry Codrington finds out about Helen's affair, however, the lives of these three characters change drastically. The novel's point of view vacillates between Helen, Fido, and Harry.

It's a stunning, well-written book, which explores the way in which lies affect the lives of each of these characters. It's also a fair representation of mid-Victorian mores; although it's tough for us today to understand, divorce was much, much more scandalous and socially crippling in an era that placed a focus on the family and the woman's role in that family. It's strange, too, to a modern reader, the laws that governed divorce in 19th century England (for example, the two primaries were prohibited from testifying). Each of the characters is well-written, and Donoghue gets into the minds of each of the main characters with ease. She never tries to infuse this book with a modern sensibility. It's a compelling book that I couldn't stop thinking about between sittings and after I'd finished.

My only problem with this otherwise superb novel is the fact that the letters are all written in a cursive script that's hard to read. But that's only a technicality.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A splendid read, July 10, 2008

By	Deborah Peifer (San Rafael CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Sealed Letter (Hardcover)

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has read any of Emma Donoghue's earlier novels that The Sealed Letter is an astonishingly well written and compelling novel. Based on a notorious nineteenth century divorce case, The Sealed Letter explores ideas about friendship and feminism, marriage and motherhood, honor and dishonor with wit, compassion and eloquence. I will call The Sealed Letter a courtroom drama as long as you promise not to imagine for a moment that there is anything of the formulaic in Donoghue's sure hand. A book to read and reread, to savor for its language and its history, its compelling characters and heart-stopping plot. An altogether worthy successor to the extraordinary Slammerkin and the splendid Life Mask.