THE INNOCENCE OF EDITH THOMPSON

A reappraisal of a British murder trial and conviction of the 1920's is less interesting as a crime (actually it was quite ordinary) then as a miscarriage of justice as it is claimed here. For Edith Thompson, after the tedium of her marriage to Percy, engaged in a love affair with Freddi Bywaters, 19 to her 27, and in an incriminating correspondence in which she suggested the disposition of her possessive husband through the medium of poison or ground glass. Some months later, Thompson was attacked by Bywaters and stabbed to death, and in the trial which followed in which both were charged with murder- his chivalry towards her helped to convict her. Broad who is probably right in his defense of Edith here since she was more than likely innocent in this impulsive act of violence, does however make some dubious claims: that her lack of moral courage and equivocation was a mark of sensitivity; that her poison plots against her husband incited her lover ""not to murder but to love""; etc. etc. An interpretation, and vindication, after the fact- though the case itself has no particular intellectual attraction.