Customs plan map · Factory plan map · Interchange plan map · Shoreline plan map · Shoreline Health Resort plan map · Woods plan map It is a historical fiction piece based in 1860's London revolving around two women - Mrs. Helen Codrington and Miss Emily "Fido" Faithfull. Their acquaintance had broken off when the Codringtons moved to Malta. The book begins with the former friends literally running into one another again years later at the Smithfield market in London. The reader begins to discover the history between the two women and the current status of their lives since last they saw one another. Firstly, let me start by saying that I think Emma Donoghue is a great writer. She can certainly spin a yarn and I kept reading right to the end, as I wanted to know what happened! However, there were a few minor issues that kept me from rating this higher. Some reviewers have said they were disappointed by the ending but I loved it. There are two nice twists in the tail which I felt added much to the story and a lot of meaning to the undercurrent stuff. The author had some good points to make and it made me consider the old 'double standard' from an entirely new perspective, even amoung women and feminists. The early feminists had much to learn about what real equality meant, as arguably we still do today.

However, I hated Helen with a passion. I found it hard to route for her at all, which is conflicting with this promoting feminism.

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This book is based on the real life divorce case of Harry and Helen Codrington which scandalised Victorian England. I found the social commentary of Victorian life very interesting, where divorce was almost unheard of, wives and children were the property of husbands, and the women’s movement was in its infancy. In a nutshell, the book documents a true event - a high-profile divorce in the Victorian era, and the interference / support of the wife's friend, 'Fido'. It's told from a variety of viewpoints, mostly from Fido's, but occasionally from Helen's (the wife) and even her husband. Its climax is the court-scene, where Helen essentially calls upon her friend to lie for her in court, but things don't turn out quite as planned... Yes, the impeachment trial and apparently this divorce trial were both scandals, and they were ostensibly about sex, but if you dig deeper into both, you'll find that the sexual accusations were just an excuse for one person, or political party, to get rid of another person they didn't like. They revealed the text, which was awesome. To do that without opening the letter is itself a sort of miracle, which I love," says Seales. "They were also complete about the technology of the artifact itself, because we can't forget that this stuff is embodied in physical form. And that's important."

What elevates The Sealed Letter above mediocrity is the three-dimensional way it portrays the people involved in this high-profile divorce. It is easy to set a divorce case in Victorian England in which the woman is the sympathetic character at the mercy of an uncaring husband. I found it hard to sympathize with Helen, who is both adulterous and manipulative, with sensibilities that radically change with her mood. Nevertheless, I understood her desire to remain a mother to her children (even if she was never very maternal) and repair the tear in her marriage that she—belatedly—realizes is her fault. It blows my mind to think about what this person who wrote the letter that we transcribed would think, if you could explain to him what we’ve done,” says Ghassaei. “It’s kind of unbelievable.” The story made me think about how many changes there have been to the role of women in society, the laws of divorce, for one thing, divorce was very new at the time and the awful treatment of the 'fallen woman' was really rather horrific compared to today's standards. The last theme echoes over and over again throughout the book. There's one quotation, which I can't locate at the moment, that aptly describes this idea. As she watches the divorce proceeding, Helen wonders if all this was an inevitable outcome of her dalliances with Mildmay and Anderson. She likens herself to a little boy pushing his toy soldier closer and closer to the edge just to see what would happen. I really enjoyed this underlying idea that we humans are prone to pushing ever so slightly too hard and bringing disaster upon ourselves. Applelec’s Rimless letters combine sophisticated construction techniques with an elegant finish.They are constructed using a built up metal letter that is combined with an acrylic iluminated face. The acrylic covers the entire face of the letter providing a robust and evenly lit surface that runs cool to touch.

Pica Range: Rimless

The only reason that I'm not giving this book one star is that it wasn't actually PAINFUL to read. But how on earth did it win a Lambda Literary Award? Perfect for the hotel and leisure industries or for luxury retail brands, standard or bespoke fonts and unique logo shapes can all be created using the construction process of the range. The book, while rife with historical detail, is populated by completely insufferable and unsympathetic characters. Moreover, the primary lesbian content (which is slim, by any measure) comes in the form of surpressed desires that turn an otherwise independent women's rights activist into a gullible and overly credulous doormat when confronted with the absurd excesses and villainous machinations of her friend/paramour. It was quite the disappointment, after Donoghue’s critical coup with Room, to turn to this novel, written a few years before but reissued to capitalize on her success. This fictional account of a real-life divorce scandal should have been a brilliant, realistic, gripping Victorian mystery along the lines of Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith or Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. Instead it was a tedious slog. Yet I can’t quite put my finger on why. The dialogue is well imagined and the setting authentically described, but still something is missing.