‘Elegantly written, jauntily paced and entertaining, The Sealed Letter is seasoned with themes of women's rights, betrayal and judgment, making it so much more than a historical novel.’
Herald Sun
‘A page-turner… mesmerizing.’
London Free Press
‘It is what Donoghue does with the facts that makes her book interesting and surprisingly relevant in our own times … an engaging narrative that subtly delivers a history lesson in the form of entertainment.’
National Post
‘... absolutely gripping.’
Notebook Magazine
‘Donoghue mines Victorian repression to fashion a very pleasurable read, creating the same kind of paradox that’s made Sarah Waters so successful…The writing here is terrific and the characters are complex.’
Now Magazine
‘The Sealed Letter is a very informative and immensely entertaining novel. Donoghue's story gives us a wonderful glimpse of Victorian society and also makes us appreciate the importance of the burgeoning nineteenth century feminist movement and the enormous effect of it on our lives today.’
Otago Daily Times
‘Well-written, entertaining and informative, this is a deliciously lurid tale complete with a clever twist at the end that will leave you more than satisfied.’
Post Script
‘Donoghue's elegantly styled, richly woven tale absorbs the everyday lives of Victorian women (rich, poor, working, home-bound, feminist, adulteress) and men (officer, lawyer, minister, adulterer, even an amateur detective) in a colorful tapestry of spiraling intrigue, innuendo, speculation and mystery. Characters indulge in pleasures at which Victorian novels could only hint, and which Donoghue renders with aplomb. Period details — etiquette, typesetting, dress, medical treatments, public amusements, shipping and jurisprudence — are rendered with a spare exactitude organic to the story. Donoghue's latest has style and scandal to burn.’
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
‘She makes 150-year-old events immediate, evoking hot, sweaty flesh under rustling layers of bombazine and conveying a powerful sense of vertigo as her characters pitch headlong into the abyss of notoriety… What could have been mere Victorian melodrama resonates here with emotional truth.’
Quill and Quire
‘A wicked tale of Sex and the Victorian City… Donoghue weaves an engrossing and often quite funny melodrama about a bad, bad girl who bursts the seams of this corseted world — it's part Forever Amber and part clockwork courtroom drama, with bawdy undercurrents of forbidden love thrown in for good measure. All in all, a deliciously wicked little romp, complete with a clever twist at the end.’
Seattle Times
'Donohue excels in her attention to period detail without overplaying the historical content. The court scenes are high-octane drama, which would not be out of place on any reality courtroom TV show. But it's her refined characterisation and the artful multiplicity of views that bring such warmth to the novel.'
Claire Scobie, Sydney Morning Herald
‘... terrifically readable.’
The Age
‘an enthralling picture of marital politics and female friendship ... I loved this elegantly clever, beautifully constructed story ... This is stylish, sophisticated writing, perfectly mirroring the world it portrays.’
The Irish Echo
‘Pop culture’s fascination with Hollywood divorces — Tom and Nicole, Denise and Charlie, Pamela and the man of the moment — pales when compared with the excitement almost any divorce stirred in Victorian England. So it is in Emma Donoghue’s cozily lurid new novel, The Sealed Letter, which tells a story all the more remarkable for being based on an actual case involving an admiral, his beautiful young wife and a prominent activist for women’s suffrage ... As with Donoghue’s previous novels Slammerkin and Life Mask, the plot is psychologically informed, fast paced and eminently readable.’
Susann Cokal, The New York Times
‘Miss Emily Faithfull is an enlightened woman running her own printing press in Victorian London. Enter her erstwhile friend, the unhappily wed Helen. Before you can say "what the Dickens?", an innocent effort to help a friend becomes a gripping courtroom drama. Inspired by a scandalous divorce case that gripped England in 1864, Emma Donoghue's The Sealed Letter is irresistible.’
Vogue Australia
‘Mid-Victorian London feels so real you can almost taste it… Donoghue is masterful in handling the theme of Fido's possible erotic desire for Helen and Helen's manipulation of same. She depicts female sexual attraction as a complex threat, both enthralling and taboo. In Victorian England, she suggests, female adulterers and lesbians were equally dangerous beings. This convincing, troubled account of marital politics reminds us that George Eliot began writing Middlemarch, a masterpiece of unhappy marriages, a few years after the Codrington case was heard.’
Washington Post
‘A smartly constructed tale of betrayal… No character is outside the author's realm of concern: no one is pure virtue or all villain, and Donoghue makes her point as emphatically as her 19th-century predecessor [George Eliot] — here is the complex, often startling measure of being human.'
Winnipeg Free Press
