Wicked Little Letters has shot to the top of Netflix's most-watched movies list in the UK and Ireland following its release last Friday.
The comedy, starring national treasures Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, covers the outrageous real-life case of Littlehampton's poison-pen letters, which became a national scandal and now the inspiration for this charming movie.
In an interview with Digital Spy, Black Mirror star Anjana Vasan (who plays police officer Gladys Moss in the movie) said it was a real surprise to find out this story was real.
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"Everybody in the cast had the same reaction — we read the script, we thought it was very funny, absurd, brilliant and wonderful, and at the end you have information about the three main women and you go: 'Oh, this is real!'," she recalled.
"We all went into our computers and did a lot of Googling, finding out what actually happened and how much was real, and how much was Jonny Sweet's imagination. Surprisingly, there are a lot of real facts in the movie."
Wicked Little Letters is quite faithful to the original case, but in case you want to know more, we delve into the true story including the aftermath of the trial and the legacy of West Sussex's first female officer.
Wicked Little Letters true story
Edith Swan was a real-life resident of 1920s Littlehampton, a seaside town in West Sussex, and Rose Gooding was indeed her Irish neighbour. Rose was a single mother, and since she moved to the town in 1918 she had built a reputation of being loud and foul-mouthed.
Edith and Rose used to be friends, but a misunderstanding related to their communal garden set them apart. That seems to be the reason why Edith wanted to take revenge, and she did so by setting up her former friend using society's prejudices to her advantage.
Not long after their fallout, Edith became the victim of obnoxious anonymous letters, a small, local case that became a national scandal discussed in Parliament.
It was Edith herself who was writing the letters and sending them to her own house, hoping Rose would be blamed for it.
The letters included all kinds of swearing, with hilarious lines like: "The cakes you make look like they've fallen out of some f**king sheep's f**king arsehole".
"The letters were so pathetic in their attempt to be swearing and aggressive that I just thought that was a very interesting character," Wicked Little Letters' writer Jonny Sweet told Digital Spy in an exclusive interview.
"She had a lot of pent-up fury, she wanted to be a vicious, brutal, hardcore swearer, but she didn't have the capacity to do that."
When the case became high-profile at the time, West Sussex's police force arrested Rose despite the lack of evidence. She faced trial in September 1920 and was charged with criminal libel (via Daily Mail).
Rose spent three months in prison, separated from her child. The moment she returned home, Edith resumed sending the letters, leading to Rose being convicted again with a longer sentence – 12 months in jail with hard labour.
By that point, Rose's barrister and police officer Gladys Moss were among the growing circle suspecting Rose had been innocent all along, and tried to prove it.
How was the poison-pen writer caught?
Edith's masterplan started to crumble when the authorities paid closer attention to the handwriting in the letters.
Rose's barrister first offered a sample of Edith's handwriting, a couple of pages with knitting instructions and a chutney recipe she shared with her neighbour when they were still friends. The lawyer pointed at the similarities with the poison pen letters' handwriting, but the judge refused to listen.
After all, how could such a religious, demure woman use such foul language?
Unmasking Edith proved more difficult than expected. It wasn't until shortly after Rose's second jail sentence that the evidence against Edith became strong enough for the police to listen.
Hoping to help her case, Edith wrote more obscenities in a notebook and sent it to the police station, claiming she found it near Rose's house. Since the notebook arrived with a letter signed by Edith herself, informing the police about her discovery, the similarities in both sets of handwriting could not be ignored any longer.
Scotland Yard sent Inspector George Nicholls to investigate the case, and he found that Rose always misspelt the word 'prison' (she usually wrote 'prision' instead). This mistake was not found in the anonymous letters.
Still, neither this finding, nor the sworn testimony of Gladys Moss assuring she witnessed Edith delivering one of the letters to a neighbour, could convince the judge to convict her.
In 1923, Moss helped concoct a plan to catch Edith red-handed. She marked a set of stamps with invisible ink and told the post office to only sell them to the new suspect. Edith was caught in the act of sending a letter to another neighbour using the marked stamps.
In July that year, a jury found Edith guilty and she was sentenced to 12 months in prison. Rose's name was cleared.
The whole story can be found in publications like Christopher Hilliard's The Littlehampton Libels: A Miscarriage of Justice and a Mystery about Words in 1920s England, in case you are hungry for more details after watching Wicked Little Letters.
Who was police officer Gladys Moss?
Although Edith and Rose are the main characters in Wicked Little Letters' true story, it's worth casting light on police officer Gladys Moss, played by Anjana Vasan in the movie.
"She was the first female police officer in the area, and she was involved in the case and in the sting at the end," Jonny Sweet told Digital Spy.
"I think being in the police force at that time was very difficult in the way that you see on screen. There were many absurd prevailing attitudes at the time that made that challenging."
Moss started her career with the Women's Police Service and served with the Ministry of Munitions at a filling factory at Hereford during World War I. During that time, she helped in only one police court case, after she found a half-burned cigarette in the explosives factory (via Sussex Express).
After the war, like many women, she had to go back to a more socially acceptable role for a woman and worked as a governess. One day, she spotted an advert in the Gazette offering a job with the police and applied for it. After this, Moss was able to develop a career as an officer of the law.
Her investigation into the Littlehampton letters case was essential in proving Edith's culpability.
In Wicked Little Letters, certain aspects of her life have been fictionalised. "I've forgotten what's real and what's not in some cases, but the general thrust of her story is real," Sweet assured us.
In November 2015, Gladys Moss was honoured with a blue plaque at Worthing Police Station, which remembers her as the first female police officer in West Sussex.
Wicked Little Letters is now available to watch on Netflix in the UK and Ireland.
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Mireia (she/her) has been working as a movie and TV journalist for over eight years. Based in the UK, she is a former deputy movies editor at Digital Spy, and previously worked for the Spanish magazine Fotogramas. Mireia's work has been published in other outlets such as Esquire and Elle in Spain, and WeLoveCinema and GamesRadar+ in the UK. She is also a published author, having written the essay Biblioteca Studio Ghibli: Nicky, la aprendiz de bruja about Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service.
During her years as a freelance journalist and film critic, Mireia has covered festivals around the world and has interviewed high-profile talents such as Kristen Stewart, Ryan Gosling, Jake Gyllenhaal and many more. She's also taken part in juries such as the FIPRESCI jury at Venice Film Festival and the short film jury at Kingston International Film Festival in London. LinkedIn
