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.
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