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.
- ISBN10 0340751673
- ISBN13 9780340751671
- Publish Date 15 March 2001 (first published 17 August 2000)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 14 August 2010
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Hodder & Stoughton
- Imprint Sceptre
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 288
- Language English