Wicked Little Letters (2023) is based on a true story of a scandal in the early 1920s in the seaside village of Littlehampton in Sussex, England. Edith Swan is a conservative upstanding Christian, a single woman living with her parents, and an active member of her community. Her father Edward, a sign painter, is a stickler for routine and Edith is subservient to him and to his orders. He makes her recite Bible verses, and if she does not follow orders or does something he does not like, as punishment he makes her write the Bible verses over and over again. Her mother Victoria, on the other hand, is a gentle, quiet lady who “knows her place”, is the treasurer of the Christian Wives, and conforms to societal rules.
Edith’s routine is disrupted when a new neighbour, Rose Gooding, an Irish woman, moves in with her daughter Nancy. Rose is young, pretty, a widow, and is loud, boisterous, and fun-loving. Edith wants to be friends with Rose but is constantly shocked at her behaviour. Rose swears a lot, drinks with the guys, and has a live-in Black boyfriend, Bill.
As neighbours in a not-so-upmarket part of town, the walls are thin, and the Swans can hear when Rose and her boyfriend are making out. It embarrasses them and their sense of propriety. The two families are at feud with each other after Rose hits one of Edward’s guests at his birthday party and stands up to him. After this incident, Rose receives a call from child protection services on the grounds that there were domestic disturbances and the assumption that she is a bad mother. There is an underlying threat that she could lose her child. Rose believes it was Edith who made the complaint though Edith denies it.
The movie begins with Edith receiving the 19th in a series of profane letters written anonymously. The letters speak ill about her and her family in the foulest language. Her father suspects that Rose has written them because there is a similarity to the crude language that she uses, and so do the police, when her father goes to inform them about the letters. The police arrest Rose after Edith is convinced by her family to make the complaint in writing to show she is being just and doing it for the good of society. Rose cannot pay the bail of three pounds and is sent to prison. Her trial is set for three months later. Nancy is left in the care of Rose’s partner Bill.
In the meantime, the local police, including the only woman police officer, Gladys Moss, are investigating the case of the mysterious letters. Gladys is perceptive and diligent in her work. She knows that there is no concrete evidence that Rose has written the letters and realises that the handwriting does not match Rose’s. Whilst Rose is in prison, the two of them start a correspondence where Rose pleads her innocence with Gladys. When Gladys raises her concerns to her superiors, they do not believe her. Instead they are misogynistic, make fun of her education and dismiss her suggestions and inputs, constantly making her feel small.
Gladys starts her own investigation, contrary to the instructions of her superior, using the excuse of checking in on the mental wellbeing of the women affected by the crime. She meets with the ladies who form the Christian Women’s Whist Club, supposedly Edith’s friends, and asks them questions including if there are people who might want to hurt Edith. This gets the women thinking and some of them are convinced that Rose might be innocent. They raise bail and get Rose released until her trial.
The movie is fascinating because the characters of the three women, Rose, Gladys and Edith, are juxtaposed against each other. Rose, an outlier because of her Irish heritage, does as she pleases, and because of this, Edith feels Rose will fit in well with the drunks and queers in prison. Gladys, too, believes that Rose should cut down on the swearing and shouting, and Edward says Rose curses like a fish, has straggly hair and marches around bare-feet on the Sabbath. All this gives the impression that people have formed judgments about Rose because she does not fit the mould of a good, proper Christian woman. It does become easy to pin the crime of the letters on her. In fact, it comes across as if she needs to be shown her place and brought in line or tamed, because she answers to no one.
Gladys, meanwhile, is fighting to be taken seriously as a police officer. But because of her gender she is constantly being ridiculed, asked to make the tea, stay in the background of the investigation, follow orders and not take any initiative. In fact, there was a rule at that time that women police officers could not marry or have children, while the men could. Edith and her father make fun of Gladys saying they find women officers funny. It is Rose who refuses to call her “woman police officer” saying she can see she is a woman and the title of officer is fine enough. Gladys’ position comes across as important only in cases regarding women, yet not important enough for an investigation like this one.
Edith, on the other hand, is upheld for being a just, forgiving Christian woman who is obedient to her father. As the eldest of eleven children, she stayed back to look after her parents. Even though she was good at her studies and her mother called her a modern-day genius, she did not pursue a career. When she had a boyfriend Sidney, her father made her give him up. At home her father is quick to correct her, ensuring her newly gained fame as an aggrieved woman will not bloat her ego. It is as though her role in the family is only to satisfy his domestic needs.
Gladys and Rose become natural allies because both of them are trying to fit into this post-war world where women are back to being slotted into domestic roles. In their own way they are breaking the status quo and trying to be accepted for who they are. Rose just wants to do the best for her daughter and give her a better life – a life different from the one that Rose has. Gladys wants to be a good police officer like her father.
Gladys and the women of the Whist group hatch a plot to catch the letter-writer who now is emboldened to write over a hundred nasty profane letters to several people in the town including Edith. It makes national news and everyone is intrigued, bringing the press to town. It is Gladys who identifies Edith as the writer of the letters, identifying her by her unique way of writing a florid ‘G’. Writing these letters was an outlet to release her frustration and anger with her circumstances. Edith could not express what she was feeling until finally when she is taken away by the police, she gathers up the courage to say, in the choicest of filthy language, what’s on her mind to her father. He is taken aback whilst Edith is just relieved that she could push back. Her pent up frustration is a result of years of being treated like a child even though she is an adult, and not allowed to have an intimate relationship and fulfil her own needs.
This movie is a good watch and reminds us of how we live in a society that is constantly judging us for who we are – gender, ethnicity, marital status, sexual identity, and so on. Even though it is set in the 1920s, many of the scenes of how women are treated resonate with us today. It also makes the point that our lives within our homes and outside of our homes can be so different. For example, Edith in public is a confident woman, but at home she is under her father’s thumb, to the point of giving up her relationship with Sidney who she was in love with. Possibly this is what made her envious of the carefree life that Rose had where she could live on her own terms and have a relationship without marriage. In the 1920s that was bold. But even today many of us are worried about what others might say or how they might behave if we lived our lives openly. Rose, too, is not completely free from these societal pressures. During the trial it is revealed that she had her daughter outside of marriage whilst she had told everyone that her husband, Nancy’s father, had died during the war. From being a war widow she is now a “loose” woman which makes the accusations of her being the writer of the profane letters all the more believable.
Gladys, too, is at the receiving end of patriarchal culture where just because she is a woman, she is not perceived to be intelligent, is ordered around, and told to stay in her lane regarding the investigation. At several moments one realises how exhausting it must be to live by other people’s expectations and standards whilst suppressing one’s own needs, desires and intelligence.
The letters themselves caused a stir because though the language was crude and vulgar, they called out the truth and put people on the spot. In a way, everyone wanted to know who would receive the next letter and what it would say, and so satisfy a perverse need to be curious about the private lives of others.
Olivia Colman as Edith Swan plays a convincing role of that annoying, irritating, interfering neighbour who is constantly telling us subtly and overtly how we must live our lives. Jessie Buckley as Rose Gooding is a character that draws one’s attention even when she does not want to be at the centre of it. We all know people in our lives who are misunderstood and unwittingly get into trouble just because of who they are, like Rose. Anjana Vasan as Officer Gladys is very relatable as she portrays a picture of a woman at work not being taken seriously, yet staying calm whilst hiding her frustration.
Wicked Little Letters released in 2023 forces us to acknowledge the fact that despite society wanting all of us to conform, people are going to live their lives the way they want to. At the end of the movie, Edith says to Rose that she had wanted to be her friend whilst Rose tells Edith, she thought if she could have been more like her, life might have been better. It is ironic that instead of celebrating our diversity, we tend to straitjacket people instead of allowing them to live their lives with respect, freedom and dignity.
Cover Image: A still from Wicked Little Letters (2023)
