The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue

Published in 2008 (April)
978-1-55468-036-8

Rating: Loved it! (5/5)

In The Sealed Letter, as in her previous novel Life Mask and in her collection of short stories The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, Emma Donoghue draws on the historical record for inspiration, this time in the 1864 case Codrington v. Codrington. Despite changing her historical setting by about 80 years (and tumultuous years at that) from Life Mask, Donoghue deals with similar human themes, those of love, friendship, obsession, and the complex and often unequal relationships between women and men.

The story centers around Emily "Fido" Faithfull, whose work in the early Victorian women's movement remained largely unacknowledged by her former colleagues, largely due to the events re-staged by this novel. The story opens with the fortuitous reunion of Fido and her estranged friend Helen Condrington and ends with a divorce case that brought scandal down on many heads, some guilty, but a few innocent.

The themes of the novel are largely drawn through natures of the characters. Fido Faithfull lives up to her surname, sometimes to the point of blindness. Helen plays the coquette who loves to be admired and who is quite skilled at finding excuses for her little improprieties. Henry Condrington travels the full path from obsessive love to obsessive hatred. These three spin the web of the plot until there seems to be no way out of the tangle in which they've caught themselves.

It's the overall commentary on relationships between men and women, however, that give the novel its weight. In situations both personal and legal, Victorian men often had the upper hand over their female counterparts. Donoghue is careful to show that it was not only men that wished to keep the status quo of the Victorian era. Some women were more than happy with their present life. Others were happy to see their enemies ruined because they defied conventions which kept life "civilized" and which they themselves, as "real" women, would never dream of breaking. Though I cannot disagree more with its message, a favourite moment in the novel involves a triumphant crow of one woman to another: "As a point of law...it's only a woman's virtue that induces her husband to leave his children in her custody. Technically speaking, children are a sort of gift a man gives his wife, you see, which he can withdraw at any time."

Though it's primarily the differences that make a woman thankful to be born after the nineteenth century, the similarities also bring their own weight, showing that we have not yet come to the end of the journey. Donoghue offers the careful reader comparisons of Victorian mores with our own, still unequal, practices: "Well, whatever his private mortifications at being accused of such an attempt, it can hardly match your friend's at being its victim," is not much different from that still-too-prevalent sentiment that "she must have asked for it," or our practice of concealing the names of rape victims, leaving the unspoken assurance that they should be ashamed, but the victims of other crimes need not be.

As in Life Mask, Donoghue does have a tendency to sacrifice naturalness of dialogue in order to wrap it around information necessary to the reader unfamiliar with Victorian society and laws. Though never quite awkward, the occasional stilted reference to a certain law, or a historical figure, doesn't quite seem to fit the characters otherwise well defined voices.

These occasional moments, however, do not blemish the clear prose of an excellent novel that gives the reader much to think about in regards to relationships and equality, both in the Victorian era, and in our own.

Cate