by Jill Dawson
First published 2000
Edie Thompson sits in her cell, writing letters to her young lover Freddy Bywaters. The year is 1923, and both face execution for the murder of her husband Percy. Through her words to "Darlint Freddie," Edie reveals how their passionate affair led to this moment. She recalls their stolen meetings, the suffocating marriage to boorish Percy, and the night everything changed. The public sees her as vain and silly, but Edie's letters show a different woman: intelligent, sensual, and fiercely independent. She rails against a society that refuses to recognize their love as genuine simply because Freddy works as a ship's laundry man from Norwood while she reads novels in Stamford Hill. As the trial proceeds, Edie realizes she's not really being judged for murder but for daring to live as a liberated woman. Freddy grows distant and mysterious, leaving Edie to face her fate alone. Her crime, she understands, is refusing to be "all sweetness and light" in a world that demands women's submission.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, crime
Vibes: emotional, intimate, suspenseful
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Norwood, Stamford Hill
Period: 1923
276 pages · Paperback · Sceptre
Content warnings: murder, violence