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Fred and Edie
Fred and Edie | Jill Dawson
3 posts | 2 read | 1 to read
In December 1922 Edith Thompson, a smart, bright, lower-middle class woman who worked in a milliner's shop, was tried for conspiring with her young lover Frederick Bywaters to murder her husband, Percy. The sensational trial, which took place in front of heaving crowds at the Old Bailey, unravelled a real life drama as exciting as any blockbuster: an illicit love affair, a back-street abortion, domestic violence, murder and a double execution. Fred and Edie draws together powerful threads between personal memory and public lives, between innocence and responsibility, and between fact and fiction. It is an exploration of a woman caught in the net of her own private fantasy and the conflicts of the era in which she lived, of her muddled attempt to defy convention and reshape her own destiny, and, finally, of the devastation she left in her wake.
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Fred and Edie | Jill Dawson

‘Vain to consider that our love might be a real love, on a par with other great loves. That just because you are from Norwood and work as a ship‘s laundry man and I grew up in Stamford Hill and read a certain kind of novel, we are not capable of true emotions, of having feelings and experiences which matter‘.

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Fred & Edie: A Novel | Jill Dawson
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Pickpick

Dawson‘s Edie is prone to long flights of fantasy, in which she imagines escaping with her lover and killing her abusive husband; these fantasies will later convict her. Yet despite the subject matter, I thought this book was a delight. Edie is captivating, charming, and complex, and Dawson captures her so well that I couldn‘t distinguish her fictional letters from the real ones she inserts.

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Jan-Marie
Fred & Edie: A Novel | Jill Dawson
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Pickpick

Fans of Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood should give this a crack. Breathing life into this true crime story is quite magical. And it's mind-boggling how less than 100 years ago, women were so disempowered. Grateful to be here in 2016, and thx Hannah Kent for the recommendation! (Also check out her novels)