Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #294426 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In the winter of 1922 Edith Waters and her younger lover, Freddy Bywaters, were found guilty of murdering Percy Waters, Edith's boorish husband. The two lovers were executed in a whirl of publicity in 1923. The case caused a sensation, a crime of passion that gripped the nation's imagination and became the raw material for Jill Dawson's sensual and captivating novel Fred and Edie, a fictional account of the lovers' romance and their subsequent trial, predominantly told through Edie's imaginary letters addressed to her lover, "Darlint Freddie". This is a remarkable novel, that brilliantly evokes the suburban world of 1920s London (T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, published the same year as the trial, runs like a leitmotif throughout the novel). Edie, viewed from the public gallery as "silly, vain" is a superb literary creation--sensual, intelligent, articulate and liberated, bitterly denouncing in her letters to Freddy a world that denies "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 that matter".

Dawson's novel gradually reveals that Edie's "crime" is actually her articulate, contradictory and assertive femininity. "I am not all sweetness and light" she insists, but it is her independent behaviour that ultimately stands trial, as Freddy becomes an increasingly enigmatic and questionable figure on the margins of the novel. Elegantly written and carefully researched, Fred and Edie is as passionate and assured as the tragic heroine it portrays. --Jerry Brotton

Review
'It will captivate readers ... The real triumph of the novel is to make the fictionalised truth sound utterly convincing - a case of fiction not so much stranger as stronger than fact. Edie is so wonderful, so bitterly honest about herself, especially her understanding of her own sensual nature. And the sex is beautifully written about. Jill Dawson magnificently gets into the woman's skin and makes the whole act sublime' -- Margaret Forster 'Jill Dawson's deft ability to map the territory of the heart, as well as the head, lends grace and conviction to this fictionalised version of a true story. FRED AND EDIE is a captivating account of a strangely impassioned, and compelling, love affair' -- Caryl Phillips 'Compelling reading' -- The Times 'Gripping ! an engrossing, passionate and tragic story' -- Daily Mail 'A haunting exploration of female desire and the tragic consequences when it finds itself repressed and thwarted.' -- Sunday Times 'A moving testimony to the desperation of unrequited love' -- The Times

Daily Mail
‘Gripping … an engrossing, passionate and tragic story'

Customer Reviews

A Little Masterpiece
In Fred & Edie Jill Dawson performs two bits of contradictory magic. She shows that, at the centre of all extraordinary events, are ordinary people, like you or I; and that ordinary people, like you or I, are nevertheless extraordinary.

Edie, the novel's narrator (who was executed, with Freddy Bywaters, her lover, for the murder of her husband in 1923), is both utterly compelling and utterly authentic, so that it comes as a real surprise, to stumble on the end notes and find that Jill Dawson has used so little material from her actual letters and woven them so seamlessly into a voice which is almost pure invention.

And this is one of the things which makes the novel works so well. Though the story was widely written about at the time, Jill Dawson uses only a few scattered details of historical research (a handful of newspaper reports, a parlour game, a dress, a Punch and Judy show...) and concentrates on getting inside the mind of this sensual, adventurous, excitable woman trapped in a loveless suburban marriage.

She is particularly good at describing (through Edie's voice) the prickly, restless discomfort of sexual desire and the act of sex itself, two areas where most novels are either embarrassing or clumsy.

Most readers seem to have taken the book as an indictment of the system that executed Edith Thompson and assumed that she was innocent of her husband's murder (which she may well have been). But the novel is subtler than this. The Edie that Jill Dawson has recreated is capable of great self-awareness, but she is also capable of great self-deception (we know, long before she does, that the dangling black shape she keeps seeing out of the corner of her eye is the hangman's noose). And the book is all the richer for its refusal to give a neat answer to this uncomfortable question.

Perhaps the best measure of Jill Dawson's success is that even though you know exactly how the story is going to end, you rapidly become so caught up in the reality of Edie's life that you approach the last few pages hoping desperately for the happy ending you know is not going to arrive.

A little masterpiece.

Faction and Truth
I picked up this book by chance, not having heard anything about it previously. It is a well written and absorbing book which I would recommend to people to see what their thoughts were, and it does provoke a good deal of thought.

A large part of that for me is the basic elements taken from a real and brutal murder and the authorial extrapolation that takes place from the unknown truths of the people involved.

I don't think that the author has been particularly unfair; to read Edie's thoughts and emotions is to feel trapped yourself. Here is a woman who has not had an extensive education, brought up to believe in certain things like having a "respectable" married home life (respectable to other people) and has to live within a societal framework that is on the edge of transition, and one that has concrete beliefs that no longer rule absolute in the 21st Century. She married someone, they were extremely ill-suited in temperament and she met someone else who she felt she truly could be herself and be appreciated by.

With that said, I don't believe that Edie comes across as a completely sympathetic character. She displays shallowness, self-involvement and a high degree of a fantasy prone personality. She takes comfort in things that a lot of people might find particularly frivolous. Edie does suffer hardships and pain, but you only find some of this out in the novel by implication. Neither do her husband Percy or her lover Fred come out of the novel with clear cut victim/perpetrator labels.

Percy appears a rather staid, physically unattractive character and when he has a drink too many his bullying and violent tendancies emerge. As the novel progresses Edie gives a view of a rather pathetic man who is both jealous and cowardly. And yet he does not appear without a certain pathos, he is someone who under the right circumstances could have been a better husband, a kinder man. Fred is the "romantic" hero, attractive, more intutitive/sensitive, wordly, sexy and sophisticated but retaining a childlike (even childish) outlook. Which all sounds terribly desirable until you look at his actions, which are by turns just as selfish, possessive and insensitive as Percy's.

What you have within the author's imagination are three flawed human beings whose chance interactions led to a devastating end.

I feel there are certain flaws to the book, when you are dealing with the unknown there always will be. Edie's imagination and use of language as narrator are highly developed, her emotional outpourings are very coherent and have a 'writerly' quality to them. There's nothing to definitively say she wasn't a very imaginative person with natural talent but it does seem to me to be heightened to a degree where a modern reader could be more open to her dilemma.

It also left me with some uncomfortable thoughts which I had on reading 'Alias Grace' by Margaret Atwood. These were real people, whose innocence of the crime or not, affected themselves, their families and friends in a way that most of us, hopefully, will never know. In some ways I would prefer to read a novel which was a product entirely of the author's mind, I can't help but feel that we are pulling these people back into the light when they would wish themselves to be in the shade of the past.

Poignant, gripping and sad
From the moment you start to read Edie's letters from prison to her lover Fred (who has murdered her husband), there's a dreadful feeling that she's not going to have the happy ending she keeps predicting. The way Edie constantly forgives her young lover for his crime combined with her gentle tellings-off, are incredibly poignant. Fred is very young and there is a sense that he does not understand how marriages work or what Edie really wanted. All this is very cleverly conveyed via Edie's letters.

I absolutely loved this book, it's beautifully written and I was captivated by Edie and Fred and their love affair from the beginning to the tragic, but inevitable end. It prompted me to research the real story of Edith Thompson and Fred Bywaters and in this case truth really is stranger and even more sad than fiction. The only reason I didn't give the book five stars is that in real life Fred was incredibly loyal to Edie, and a victim of her fantasies, whereas in the book you get the impression that he was a bit weak and selfish and I don't think he deserves that.