Jill Dawson

I watched a documentary last year about the execution in 1923 of Edith Thompson and her lover Freddy Bywaters for the murder of Edith's husband Percy, and wanted to read more about the case. There are various books about the 'crime of passion', most famously by Rene Weis, but I thought a fictionalised account might be more accessible and emotional. Jill Dawson's narrative is certainly that, bringing a wholly imagined but no less sympathetic version of Edie to life, if that is the right show more choice of word.

Told in a patchwork but well-paced blend of real newspaper accounts, fictional letters from Edie in jail to Freddy, and in flashback, the author creates a strong personality for the woman sentenced to death for flouting tradition and having a vivid imagination. Edie's letters to Freddy, which he never receives but flow from her prison issue pencil in a twisted sort of stream of consciousness, allow her to be honest about her feelings while deceiving herself about the future.

Did Edith Thompson goad her lover into attacking her husband? Should she have been sentenced to death for writing passionate letters to a man she wasn't married to, and imagining ways to get rid of the obstacle between them? ('How much more interesting life is when one has an occasion to write about it!', Edie muses) I believe that Edie was judged for her lifestyle and not her part in a murder, but we will never know for sure, and only authors like Jill Dawson and crime biographers like Weis can offer her a defence. show less

The Great Lover is a fictional novel based upon the life and loves of the WWI poet Rupert Brooke.

Brooke was part of the influential artistic circles of the day, mixing with the likes of Virginia Stephen (Woolf) and Lytton Strachey, and ringleader of his own influential group of socialites at Cambridge - many of them members of the Fabian Society - who became known as the Neo-Pagans. Renowned for his good looks and boyish charm (W. B. Yeats famously referred to him as "the handsomest young show more man in England") Jill Dawson has weaved a fabulous fictional novel around his love interests and search for self.

Whilst the Cambridge friends and lovers are all based on factual research, in this novel Dawson creates a fictional love interest with a maid Nell who works at the Orchard Tea Rooms in Grantchester where Brooke stayed and spent a lot of his time over a number of years. She uses Nell and Brooke's voices to narrate the story, and whilst their part of the story is purely fictional, they are an instrument to tell an imagined account of many of the real aspects of Brooke's friendships and love interests, some of which is taken from actual letters Brooke sent around this time.

I've mostly found Jill Dawson to be a strong writer who excels in weaving great fictional stories out of nuggets of factual stories from the past, and The Great Lover was another very enjoyable read. Rupert Brooke is the out and out star of the show in this novel; Dawson conveys a very vivid picture of his magnetic attractiveness mixed with geniality and boyish good humour, of his pull and popularity amongst the Cambridge set, and his dark doubts and insecurities around his literary talent, sexuality and understanding of love.

Having finished the novel I almost feel like I'm going to miss being in his company - for me that's great writing.

It's not a perfect novel - despite only being 300 pages long I found it slow to engage me for a while, but once I became immersed in Brooke's world and social circles I wanted to stay there longer as a fly on the wall.

4 stars - closer to 3.5 for the first part of the novel, and much nearer to 4.5 by the end. Jill Dawson remains on my list of unsung modern favourites. show less

Lucky Bunny is fiction, but it is presented as the memoir of a female criminal, from her birth in 1933 to the 1960s.

Queenie, as she has chosen to call herself, was born and brought up in London's East End. Her life of crime starts with stealing some milk, then she moves into shoplifting as a child, often working with older family friends. She has been brought up largely by her grandmother and her dad's girlfriends, most of them involved in various criminal activity.

I found Lucky Bunny a joy show more to read. Queenie is a vivid and memorable character, clever, tough, sharply observant and funny, soaking up all around her. She meets many of the famous, and infamous, Londoners of her day, and is witness to many real episodes in East End history. In some ways, her life has been a bit of a nightmare, with poverty, neglect and deprivation and several family tragedies. Queenie doesn't see it like that. She is no one's victim, but a great survivor. Or is she? I am not totally sure I can trust all of Queenie's statements about herself. Is she really as lucky as she proclaims?

I was also fascinated by the way Dawson takes up so many bits of London's social and women's history as well as criminal folklore and weaves them into a terrific yarn. I was amused by Queenie's namedropping of lots of real people and events, including Ruth Ellis and Christine Keeler. Queenie even suggests she might have been delivered at birth in 1933 by a young midwife called Jennifer, undertaking her training with the nuns, a reference to Jennifer Worth's Call the Midwife. In fact, Worth wasn't even born then and her book takes place more than 20 years later - is this a clue that some of Queenie's encounters with other real people are also her own inventions?

I received a review copy of this book through the Amazon Vine programme. show less

For a few pages at the beginning I ummed and ahhed over whether to put this down and put it on the "going straight back to the library" pile. After that I struggled to put it down at all. It was a completely captivating read. The narrator is Tina, a girl from the Fens who ends up working at a prestigious American university. She's researching seahorses, which isn't really essential to the plot, but the detail adds a depth to the book. Coming home to England for her brother's wedding she digs show more into her own thirty year old memories of being ten years old when one of her best friends went missing. It's coincidental to the plot that the area Tina returns to is in the midst of searching for two missing girls in a real life story. The reference is obvious and I'm not sure why the author doesn't make it explicit. Coincidental to the plot, but not to the book. The author did a fabulous job of constructing the layers of the story and gradually stripping them back. It was all very believable, the cultural references nearly all seemed bang on, and I can't find much to fault about it. Great stuff. show less