After being short-listed five times previously, Emma Donoghue has finally won herself a Lambda Literary Award for her new historical novel, The Sealed Letter.
Based on a scandalous divorce case that captivated and intrigued the English public in 1864, The Sealed Letter reflects modern society’s obsession with scandal and is reminiscent of certain high-profile modern dramas played out in court, complete with claims of lesbianism, secret letters and a stained dress.
The story follows Miss ‘Fido’ Faithfull as a chance encounter with her once-dear friend, the unhappily married Helen Codrington, draws her into a dangerous situation of lies and adultery.
‘While I don’t choose my historical-fiction cases for their contemporary parallels, this one was delightfully easy to compare to the Twitter-obsessed celebrity culture of today,’ said Donoghue.
‘In capturing the earnest yet salacious interest so many Victorians took in the Codrington divorce, I was thinking about friends of mine who got caught up in the OJ trial or the Clinton impeachment.’
Writing historical fiction is often a balancing act between fact and poetic license. Although Donoghue carefully researched the divorce case through court records and newspaper articles of the time, it is often impossible to learn the emotional truth or motivation behind characters now relegated to dusty archives.
‘Everybody in court sounded like they were lying, which left me very free to pick and choose between their versions of events,’ she said.
‘I didn’t change any major facts; I just put together a plausible sequence of events, based on the many clashing testimonies offered in court. I did make it all happen faster; real life is slow and badly paced.
‘And of course, as I’ve found before in writing fiction closely based on fact (especially my 1790s novel, Life Mask), there is still vast room for invention when it comes to the private interactions between people that never make it into official history.’
Donoghue’s diverse range of work includes nine fiction books, two literary history novels, two anthologies and two plays, many of which have received awards from both mainstream and GLBT organisations.
Her 1995 novel, Hood won the Stonewall Book Award and Slammerkin, released in 2000, received the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction.
‘I was rather amused when Slammerkin won a lesbian fiction award without having a word of lesbian content; I’d deliberately steered away from making my heroine a lesbian as I already knew she was going to be a killer and I wanted to avoid the thwarted-lesbian-lust-leads-to-bloodshed motif,’ she said.
‘But then, some define lesbian fiction as what lesbians write, so that’s fair enough.’
The Sealed Letter is published in Australia by Scribe and is in bookshops now. For more information check out: www.emmadonoghue.com
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