New from the University Press of Kansas:
Lizzie Borden on Trial: Murder, Ethnicity, and Gender (June 2015), by
Joseph A. Conforti (University of Southern Maine). The Press explains:
Most people could probably tell you that Lizzie Borden
took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks, but few could say that,
when tried, Lizzie Borden was acquitted, and fewer still, why. In Joseph
A. Confortis engrossing retelling, the case of Lizzie Borden,
sensational in itself, also opens a window on a time and place in
American history and culture.
Surprising for how much it reveals
about a legend so ostensibly familiar, Confortis account is also
fascinating for what it tells us about the world that Lizzie Borden
inhabited. As Conforti—himself a native of Fall River, the site of the
infamous murders—introduces us to Lizzie and her father and step-mother,
he shows us why who they were matters almost as much to the trials
outcome as the actual events of August 4, 1892. Lizzie, for instance,
was an unmarried woman of some privilege, a prominent religious woman
who fit the profile of what some characterized as a Protestant nun. She
was also part of a class of moneyed women emerging in the late 19th
century who had the means but did not marry, choosing instead to pursue
good works and at times careers in the helping professions. Many of her
contemporaries, we learn, particularly those of her class, found it
impossible to believe that a woman of her background could commit such a
gruesome murder.
As he relates the details, known and presumed, of the murder and the
subsequent trial, Conforti also fills in that background. His vividly
written account creates a complete picture of the Fall River of the
time, as Yankee families like the Bordens, made wealthy by textile
factories, began to feel the economic and cultural pressures of the
teeming population of native and foreign-born who worked at the spindles
and bobbins. Conforti situates Lizzies austere household, uneasily
balanced between the well-to-do and the poor, within this social and
cultural milieu—laying the groundwork for the murder and the trial, as
well as the outsize reaction that reverberates to our day. As Peter C.
Hoffer remarks in his preface, there are many popular and fictional
accounts of this still-controversial case, but none so readable or so
well-balanced as this.
More information is available
here.
