The Sealed Letter
THE SEALED LETTER (London: Picador, 2011, ISBN-10: 1447205979, ISBN-13: 978-1447-205975) (Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2008, ISBN: 9781554680368; ISBN-10: 1554680360) (New York: Harcourt [now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt], 2008, ISBN 978-0-15-101549-8, Mariner paperback 2009, ISBN 9780547247762) (Australia and New Zealand: Scribe, 2009, ISBN 9781921372834).
Based on a scandal that gripped Britain in the 1860s, this domestic thriller explores a feminist spinster’s reluctant involvement in a sordid divorce. On publication in the US in 2009, THE SEALED LETTER was joint winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. In Canada, it was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a NOW Magazine Top Ten Book of the Year. Published in the UK in 2011, it was a Radio 2 Book Club choice.
US edition:
Canadian edition:
UK edition:
Australia/NZ paperback:
http://www.scribepublications.com.au/book/thesealedletter
'Blissfully readable and immaculately researched.' - TIMES
‘The author interlaces hard-hitting historical fact and imaginative fiction into the narrative with a deft and breezy touch: the reader can almost hear the characters' voices long after closing the book.’ – SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
‘A page-turning drama packed with sex, passion and intrigue.’ – DAILY MAIL
‘A glorious piece of Victoriana: it's elegant and well-constructed, it's finished off with fancy swoops and swirls, but it's also a great work of industry. It's like the London that Donoghue describes in the first few pages, a big clanking machine that sucks you in, and it's powered by some of the most important subjects any novel can tackle: friendship, marriage, loyalty and a most important question - who can you trust?’ – SUNDAY HERALD
A real page-turner, like the Victorian potboilers Fido reads in secret.
It is also a sensitively-managed story of female friendship gone wrong; an essay on the manners and mores of Victorian London; a history of the early pioneers of the women’s movement; and a thriller about adultery… an involving story, impeccably researched and a pleasure to read.’ – SUNDAY BUSINESS POST
'Elegantly written, jauntily paced and entertaining, The Sealed Letter is seasoned with themes of women's rights, betrayal and judgment, making it so much more than a historical novel.' - HERALD SUN (MELBOURNE)
‘Cosily lurid… As with Donoghue’s previous novels SLAMMERKIN and LIFE MASK, the plot is psychologically informed, fast paced and eminently readable… THE SEALED LETTER provides both the titillating entertainment readers like Helen and Fido crave and the more sober exploration of truth, commitment and betrayal Harry might appreciate. Donoghue’s sympathy for all three of her central characters emerges through intimate narration and lifts the novel out of the tabloid muck.’ – NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
‘Mid-Victorian London feels so real you can almost taste it… Donoghue is masterful in handling the theme of Fido's possible erotic desire for Helen and Helen's manipulation of same. She depicts female sexual attraction as a complex threat, both enthralling and taboo. In Victorian England, she suggests, female adulterers and lesbians were equally dangerous beings. This convincing, troubled account of marital politics reminds us that George Eliot began writing Middlemarch, a masterpiece of unhappy marriages, a few years after the Codrington case was heard.’ – WASHINGTON POST
‘A wicked tale of Sex and the Victorian City… Donoghue weaves an engrossing and often quite funny melodrama about a bad, bad girl who bursts the seams of this corseted world — it's part "Forever Amber" and part clockwork courtroom drama, with bawdy undercurrents of forbidden love thrown in for good measure. All in all, a deliciously wicked little romp, complete with a clever twist at the end.’ – SEATTLE TIMES
‘A thoroughly riveting courtroom drama… Juicy, vicious, elegant and thoughtful.’ - GLOBE AND MAIL
“The Sealed Letter is a legal drama so labyrinthine and full of lurid twists (including a mysterious sealed document and a dress with incriminating stains) that it rivals any Hollywood scandal … So intense it almost burns holes in the page. … Donoghue does not create characters and settings so much as actual people in time and place, and though the novel's strictures are outdated, its fidelity to the human heart reaches beyond the limits of time.” EDMONTON JOURNAL