A War-Time Wooing; a Story, by Captain Charles King
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15
Ratings1
Average rating3
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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This came in the mail last week, a BookCrossing bookring. I didn't like it at first. Fred and Edie, I learned, are murderers. They fell in love with each other and Edie's husband was in the way. The two teamed up to kill him and be free to be together. Of course, it did not work out as they had planned and both Fred and Edie ended up in jail for murder.
Fred and Edie is based on a true story. Edie wrote letters to Fred and the trials of the two were heavily publicized; the author used these to create this book.
The book is written mostly as letters Edie wrote to Fred, with a few newspaper articles interspersed in the story. Most of the letters are the author's invention, but a few are actual letters written by Edie and all the newspaper articles are genuine.
I liked the book more as I read along. Edie and Fred were not glorified in the book, nor condemned, but, instead, were revealed to be real human beings, doing things that were both good and bad.
