Au Revoir Now Darlint: The Letters of Edith Thompson

(Hardback)

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The letters that led to Edith Thompson's execution in 1923, collected in print for the first time by the award-winning author of Rex vs Edith Thompson.

A hundred years ago, on the night of 3 October 1922, a thirty-two-year-old clerk named Percy Thompson was stabbed to death as he walked home to his suburban villa in Ilford. With him was his wife, twenty-eight-year-old Edith. His killer was Ediths lover: Frederick Bywaters, a merchant seaman aged twenty. Bywaters was hanged for murder on 9 January 1923. So too was Edith Thompson.

Despite a lack of any tangible evidence linking her to the murder, Edith found herself condemned by a society steeped in sexism. What sealed her fate were the letters she had penned to her lover, which were interpreted by the law as incitement to murder. These letters are remarkable documents. Charged with the vitality of Edith's voice, they are moving, perplexing, maddening, banal, spectacularly sensual, infused with a stream-of-consciousness immediacy. And they have never been collected in print, until now.

In Au Revoir Now Darlint Laura Thompson author of the CWA Gold Dagger-shortlisted Rex vs Edith Thompson gathers the letters together alongside illuminating commentary to tell the remarkable story of a woman ahead of her time and an extraordinary imagination that ultimately led to appalling tragedy.

Author Bio

Laura Thompson, who is unrelated to Edith, has been fascinated for many years by the Thompson-Bywaters case. She re-examined it in Rex v Edith Thompson: A Tale of Two Murders, which was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction in 2018. Her other books include The Last Landlady, a memoir of her publican grandmother, published by Unbound in 2018; an Edgar-nominated biography of Agatha Christie; and the New York Times bestseller The Six, about the lives of the Mitford sisters. Laura lives in London.