Reading Wednesday

[troisoiseaux]

Read Finding Hester by Erin Edwards, about the making of the musical Operation Mincemeat, the group of fans whose crowdsourced research discovered that the MI5 secretary identified as Hester Leggett in Ben Macintyre's nonfiction account of Operation Mincemeat (and subsequent adaptations, including the musical) was actually named Hester Leggatt, and her life story that they uncovered, as well as biographical details about the other real-life figures featured in the musical. (In one particularly charming note: Ewen Montagu's descendants are fans of the musical, with one of them actually participating in the fan Discord that hosted the #FindingHester research efforts.) This is a love letter to online fandom at its best - finding people to collaborate with on a passion project - and to archival research, and a delightful tribute to one of history's proverbial forgotten well-behaved women. It turns out that the real Hester Leggatt was neither the elderly, embittered spinster of the 2021 movie adaptation of Macintyre's book or the musical's not-quite-war widow, channeling the fiancé she lost in WWI into the letters from "Pam" to "Bill" used to provide verisimilitude for Operation Mincemeat's Trojan corpse: Hester was in her 30s when she worked for MI5, and the WWII-era diaries and letters that she left behind, which the Leggatt family shared with the research team, reveal a vibrant social life and a years-long relationship with a married man (!) who was, in fact, an Army officer stationed abroad during the war. (He was separated but not divorced; their relationship was apparently an open secret, but appears to have ended because he wouldn't get divorced. Hester never married.)

Made some progress in Caroline Fraser's Murderland, which continues to be less focused on serial killers of the 1970s Pacific Northwest than I had expected; instead, the most recent chapter I finished touched on Dune (which I've also been neglecting), the Vietnam War, and Fraser's childhood daydreams about killing her abusive father.

Comments

[kore]

"the MI5 secretary identified as Hester Leggett in Ben Macintyre's nonfiction account of Operation Mincemeat (and subsequent adaptations, including the musical) was actually named Hester Leggatt"

That's really neat!

[osprey_archer]

Finding Hester sounds amazing! (And incidentally I'm finally getting around to reading Operation Mincemeat, because it heavily influenced another book that I just read!)

[lunabee34]

Both these books sound so interesting.

[skygiants]

omg I had no idea Finding Hester existed and I must read it!!