Fred & Edie: A Novel - Softcover

Dawson, Jill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618197281 ISBN 13: 9780618197286

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2002

Synopsis

In a dazzling act of literary license, the novelist and poet Jill Dawson has transformed the sensational true story of Britain’s infamous condemned adulteress into a dramatic novel of passion, murder, and scandal, as seductive as it is shocking. One night in London in 1922, a clerk named Percy Thompson is stabbed to death as he walks home from the theater. The spectacular case that follows captures the imagination of an entire nation, as Percy’s wife, Edith, and her young lover, Frederick Bywaters, are imprisoned, summarily tried, and hanged for murder, even as a petition to spare their lives receives more than one million signatures.
Stylish, tantalizing, “with descriptions of the sex act from a woman’s viewpoint [that] are both lyrical and sublime” (Daily Mail), FRED & EDIE is a hauntingly authentic portrait of a woman whose passio ultimately leads to her destruction. Reminiscent of both Lady Chatterley and Emma Bovary, Jill Dawson’s Edie falls into the category of the unforgettable.

About this title

About the Author:

Jill Dawson is an award-winning poet and the editor of several anthologies, including The Virago Book of Love Letters. She has published several novels including Tricks of the Light and Magpie. She was the British Council Fellow at Amherst College in 1997 and was the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of East Anglia. She is the founder and director of Gold Dust Writers, where she supports other writers. She lives with her family in Cambridgeshire, near London.

From Publishers Weekly:

Dawson's third novel (after Tricks of the Light and Magpie) strikingly and elegantly blends fact and fiction in a reimagining of the events surrounding the spectacular 1922 London trial of Edith Thompson and her lover, Frederick Bywaters, who were convicted and hanged for murdering Edith's husband, Percy. Told primarily in letters Edie writes to her "darlint" Freddy while they are both imprisoned, the story offers a moving portrait of domestic tragedy and an understated but penetrating social commentary. Actual newspaper accounts and a few excerpts from the real Edith Thompson's letters are interspersed throughout; ironically, perhaps, they are less interesting less convincing, even than the fictional material Dawson attributes to Edie. Defiant, intelligent Edie finds solace in writing and in reliving her doomed but passionate affair with Freddy, a ship's steward seven years her junior who had been her sister's "paramour" first. Her language full of longing, rich with metaphor is stunning, and her increasing understanding of brutish Percy, callow Freddy, herself and human nature in general is almost redemptive. In a letter that Freddy never receives, she writes: "We had our happiness didn't we, the light might shine through it sometimes but it was green and fresh and unbending as a blade of grass, wasn't it, Freddy, while it lasted?" It is a testimony to Dawson's abilities that even though the novel must advance toward an inevitable conclusion, its story is gripping, surprising and beautiful. 5-city author tour, national advertising. (Sept.)Forecast: This title was a finalist for the Whitbread Prize; a film (Another Life) based on the same incidents premiered in the U.K. and is scheduled for U.S. release this year. Though set 80 years ago in England, the novel should draw a contemporary American audience given the controversy that continues to surround the issue of capital punishment.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0618197281
• ISBN 13: 9780618197286
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288