Fred & Edie

Jill Dawson

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London, 1922. Edith Thompson, an attractive, confident, financially independent 27-year-old woman, married during the Great War but soon finds her suburban life - and husband, Percy - stifling. Excited by the new freedoms available to women, dreaming of the kind of romantic and glamorous world she finds in novels and in films, she takes a lover, Frederick Bywaters, who is seven years her junior. Never in her wildest dreams could Edie have imagined the devastating end to her illicit romance: Bywaters, in a fit of jealousy, stabs Percy Thompson to death as he and his wife walk home one night from the theater. And in a sensational case that captures the imagination of an entire nation, Fred and Edie are summarily tried, convicted and hanged at the gallows - even as a petition to spare their lives receives more than one million signatures. Based on a true story, Fred & Edie is a dramatic novel of passion, murder and a spectacular public trial at a time of momentous change for women. Drawing on extensive research, poet and academic Jill Dawson creates a marvelously intimate, realistic and convincing account of a strangely ardent and compelling love affair.