Emily ‘Fido’ Faithfull, a stout, plain, clever Victorian, founder-member of the feminist Langham Place group, manager of the ground-breaking Victoria Press which extends employment possibilities for women, has her story lightly fictionalised in The Sealed Letter. The action starts with the return from a posting to Malta of Fido’s erstwhile best friend, Helen Codrington, a naval wife with a yellow-whiskered colonel in tow. Helen needs an alibi and a trysting-place; the apparently guileless Fido and her drawing-room sofa will do nicely.
Before Malta, Fido had lived with Helen and her older, straitlaced husband Harry. Fido’s asthma had been the pretext for Helen to leave the marital chamber and curl up in her friend’s bed each night.
What confidences did the two women exchange? Harry, at last, politely ejected Fido from his household, and the friendship lapsed.
Harry becomes a Vice-Admiral, but, emasculated by the fame of his father, a hero of Trafalgar, as well as by Helen’s increasingly flagrant behaviour, he snaps, and files for divorce. In 1864 this is a rare and messy procedure. Fido, the crucial witness, is sucked into a mire that isolates her from her feminist friends and threatens her career.
The publisher’s strapline promises a ‘delicious tale’, but Emma Donoghue rightly avoids deliciousness. Her London is a muddy, foggy, unwholesome place, with the court room (as in Bleak House) its dirty centre, tainting all who pass through. Helen’s lurid emerald and magenta frocks, her siren’s red hair and sapphire eyes, stand out in sickly contrast in this dark brown world. The Codringtons’ two little daughters, obligingly erecting a symbolic house of cards like the girls in Augustus Egg’s 1858 morality painting ‘Past and Present’, look on, half comprehending, as their parents’ marriage collapses.
Donoghue captures this suffocating mid-Victorian atmosphere successfully — poor Fido literally gasps for breath.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in