2.5
I, along with seemingly everyone, adored Donoghue's breakout work Room. So when I spotted that she'd written a historical fiction novel involving some kind of scandalous affair I was all over it. Sadly, this was definitely a little bit of a let-down.

The Sealed Letter is based on a real-life divorce case that scandalised 18th century Britain, and follows Emily 'Fido' Faithfull. She's a spinster committed to the Women's Cause who works for a magazine and press. One day she bumps into her one time closest friend Helen Codrington, who had been away in Malta with her admiral husband and they had fallen out of touch. Within a short-time of them striking up their friendship again, Helen confesses that she has been having an affair with a younger officer. Fido agrees to help her end the arrangement, only to get sucked into the affair and its fallout.

So, it all sounded very promising. However, despite plenty of built-in drama this book really seemed to drag. Due to Fido's involvement in the early days of the women's movement we get a lot of infodumping. A. Lot. And discussions between characters that seem to be only there to remind the reader that Early Feminists Were Problematic.

Character-wise, the central trio of Fido, Helen and Harry (Helen's husband) are pretty well developed, though there was part of me that just wanted more of Helen who was the character whose actions were really the most important. There were a couple of characters that were fairly one-dimensional however; Helen's lover was pretty standard, Mrs Watson who stands behind Harry is like a super simplified Mrs Danvers and pretty much all the other women Fido works with are there to be mouthpieces for British history (though seeing Emily Davies was pretty cool).

This was by no means an awful book, and does a pretty good job at highlighting the really poor position that women found themselves in if they wished to leave unhappy marriages. But it's not one that I would overly recommend.