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Amazingly, and for the first time since I dived into the word of an English undergraduate, I am running low on unread books. This is brilliant news as it gives
me an excuse to expand my ever-growing library and head out to the nearest
bookshop. But it did mean that in collating my holiday reading list, I had to
delve into my mum’s bookshelf.
After spotting Emma Donoghue’s name, I grabbed the chunky looking paperback, titled The Sealed Letter, in the hope that it would be as good as Donghue’s Room.
After spotting Emma Donoghue’s name, I grabbed the chunky looking paperback, titled The Sealed Letter, in the hope that it would be as good as Donghue’s Room.
The blurb was promising: two friends in the 19th
century, one struggling to juggle her boring marriage with a tempestuous
affair, the other a women’s right’s activist who owns a printing press and
publishes a political women’s magazine. Sounds like just the sort of easy
historical fiction I love to read on holiday.
However, the opening pages were thoroughly disappointing. The writing was stilted and the dialogue over thought. Helen, married to Admiral Codrington, was vivacious and interesting, but her friend Emily Faithful was as dowdy and boring as her un-corseted brown dress. Faithful should have been the star of this book. Based upon the real Emily Faithful, her list of accompishments promised an active, passionate and staunch promoter of women’s rights. A character who knows her own mind and isn’t afraid to defy convention for the sake of practicality. But in The Sealed Letter Emily Faithful hardly deserved a room of her own. She was naïve and cowardly when faced with real events, for all the supposed feistiness of her character.
Eighty pages in I considered giving up and placing The Sealed Letter alongside War and Peace and Midnight’s Children in the very small “unreadable” section of my
bookshelf. The fact my mum had no recollection of the book which still contained her bookmark didn't bode well, but I persevered and I’m glad that I did.
As the book progresses,
Helen and Emily become central in a divorce case in which husbands can exploit the
new Matrimonial Causes Act in order to divorce their unfaithful wives –
needless to say the Act does not work vice versa. The specifics of the trial,
which were based on reportings of the real Codrington v. Codrington case in the
1880s, was enlightening as to the trapped position married women were placed in
and the ruin that divorce promised for both parties.
The Sealed Letter was
worth finishing but I’m not sure it’s worth starting. At a hefty 480 pages, filled with drivelling “my dears” and “my darlings”, I can think of a great many
more books worth spending a few hours with – check out my complete bookshelf
with star ratings here.
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