The Sealed Letter

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It was quite the disappointment, after Donoghue’s critical coup with Room, to turn to this novel, written a few years before but reissued to capitalize on her success. This fictional account of a real-life divorce scandal should have been a brilliant, realistic, gripping Victorian mystery along the lines of Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith or Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. Instead it was a tedious slog. Yet I can’t quite put my finger on why. The dialogue is well imagined and the setting authentically described, but still something is missing. I wanted to read a female author that was new to me and was interested in reading the book, "Room" before seeing the movie. However, this book was unavailable at the library and Emma Donoghue's "The Sealed Letter" was. After reading the synopsis on the inside cover, I decided to try it. Virtual unwrapping can provide an answer, he says, but its methods always have to be fully described and transparent, as they were in this case, so that others can follow the process step by step. "They told you in their paper what a letter says inside without ever opening it. You have to have some kind of trust in that. Because the artifact itself will never be opened," Seales points out. The trouble is, the ink markings look all jumbled up, because many layers of folded paper are pressed close together and words appear to overlap.

But what of the eponymous letter?! What's so special, so scandalous, that it remains sealed until the final chapter? Without going into too much detail, let me just say that this is more a MacGuffin than anything. It serves a minor purpose, but the book would have worked even with the letter removed, so don't spend too much time stressing over it as you read, OK? This book is based on the real life divorce case of Harry and Helen Codrington which scandalised Victorian England. I found the social commentary of Victorian life very interesting, where divorce was almost unheard of, wives and children were the property of husbands, and the women’s movement was in its infancy.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. I've been an admirer of Emma Donoghue's prose for a long time, enjoying both her contemporary and historical novels. This tale, based on a true story involving a sensational divorce trial in Victorian England, breezes along and is enjoyable in every way. As in real life, none of the three main characters is without fault, and none is completely to blame. I feel, though, given the talent of the writer, that the constraints she places by keeping fairly true to the original story make for slightly poorer fiction. I suppose I would like to have a slightly more satisfying conclusion and a slightly tighter bond with a main character.

I'm not sure what attracted me to The Sealed Letter. It's a book that exists in that intersection among historical fiction, fiction "based on a true story," and relationship drama fuelled by larger issues of gender and individualism, the sort of book that can appeal to so many people yet go unnoticed because it looks "too historical" or "too much non-fiction" or "too romantic." When I started reading The Sealed Letter, I hoped for something good but didn't expect anything great. I was pleasantly surprised. Dambrogio and a team of researchers now say they've managed to read one of these unopened Renaissance letters, with the help of a medical scanner. The last theme echoes over and over again throughout the book. There's one quotation, which I can't locate at the moment, that aptly describes this idea. As she watches the divorce proceeding, Helen wonders if all this was an inevitable outcome of her dalliances with Mildmay and Anderson. She likens herself to a little boy pushing his toy soldier closer and closer to the edge just to see what would happen. I really enjoyed this underlying idea that we humans are prone to pushing ever so slightly too hard and bringing disaster upon ourselves. Till I reached the end and read the author’s note, I wasn’t aware “The Sealed Letter’ is based on some actual individuals Emma Donoghue dug out from 19th century. Unlike in her “Astray” where real incidents were converted to short stories, this time she has spreads it to a full novel.I really enjoyed the writing of this one, however, I do feel it is slightly too long. A couple of chapters could have been reduced. I also really liked the time in which this took place, with Fido being part of a Woman's Rights movement, promoting women working for their own money. I can definitely see why everyone raves about Emma Donoghue books. The challenge here was really to try to find a way to manipulate that data and actually virtually unfold it so that we could get it into a flat state," she says, "and actually kind of generate something that looks like an image of the letter if it had been opened and flattened. But in reality, we haven't even touched the letter." In saying that, I did become a little frustrated with both ‘Fido’ and Harry being so gullible, especially when these two characters are supposed to have good intelligence and foresight and yet both are used by a character who appears, childlike in her selfishness, as though she needs to be treated with kid gloves and forgiven for her indiscretions and appeased when she has tantrums.