Sweet Adelaide: A Victorian Puzzle Solved - Hardcover

Symons, Julian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002316692 ISBN 13: 9780002316699

Publisher: Collins, 1980

Synopsis

1st edition 1st printing hardcover, near fibe book, near fine unclipped dw (dust jacket) - We have traded for 20+ yearsIn stock shipped from our UK warehouse Each Book is in a protective clear bag, well packaged and normally sent out within 24 hou

About this title

Review:

Like Jonathan Goodman's The Last Sentence (p. 608), this is what Symons calls "an experimental crime story" - a fictionalized True Crime, complete with supposed solution. Here: the 1880s case of Adelaide Bartlett, acquitted in the poisoning of husband Edwin. Symons' version is a flashback-and-forward mosaic - diaries, trial testimony, years-later confession - that presents Adelaide as a Dickensian waif turned Victorian schizo: bastard child of a Lord-of-the-Manor, she grows up isolated and scorned, gets religion at a convent school, and is virtually sold-in-marriage to vulgar grocer Edwin - a hearty hypochondriac with rotting teeth and a large sexual appetite. Revolted by sex (especially after a stillborn child), Adelaide latches onto assorted cults and develops an obsessive "Pure Love" for a handsome minister. And finally she must free herself - with a semi-mercy killing of pathetic, ill, depressed Edwin. The only mystery: how she got the chloroform down his throat. Symons' answer is plausible enough, and, throughout, his concentration on Victorian disease and psychology is properly grisly. Still, Adelaide's psycho-portrait is never quite convincing enough to provide a compelling center here, and though skillful, this remains more an exercise than a novel - and slightly disappointing after the total Victorian triumph of The Blackheath Poisonings (1978). (Kirkus Reviews)

About this edition

• Publisher: Collins
• Publication date: 1980
• ISBN 10: 0002316692
• ISBN 13: 9780002316699
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288