The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings is the first to collect Garver Jordan’s fiction and journalism, much of which has been out of print for over a century. Jordan began her career as a reporter, making her name as one of few women journalists to cover the Lizzie Borden murder trial for the New York World in 1893. Jordan’s distinctive, narrative-driven coverage of the Borden and other high-profile murder cases brought her national visibility, and she turned increasingly to fiction writing. Drawing on her experiences as a true-crime reporter and newspaper editor, she published detective novels and short story collections such as Tales of the City Room that explored the fine line between women’s criminality and crimes against women. Employing popular genre conventions as a means of dealing with women’s issues, Jordan exposed gendered abuse in the workplace and the prevalence of sexual violence. The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings encourages readers to draw a historical trajectory from Jordan’s pioneering literary activism to the writings of contemporary journalists and novelists whose work continues to fuel discussions of gender, feminism, and crime, raising questions about who gets to tell women’s stories, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement
ABOUT LORI HARRISON-KAHAN
Lori Harrison-Kahan teaches in the English Department at Boston College and has received multiple awards for recovering forgotten literary works by women. In addition to co-editing The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings with Jane Carr, she is the editor of The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson, co-editor of Heirs of Yesterday by Emma Wolf, co-editor of Matrilineal Dissent: Women Writers and Jewish American Literary History, and author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary.
ABOUT JANE CARR
Jane Greenway Carr is a journalist, writer, and scholar. With Lori Harrison-Kahan, she is co-editor of The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings. She is senior editor of ideas and planning for CNN Opinion, where she oversees social and cultural commentary for CNN.com. She is a winner of the New York Press Club Award for online commentary, a former lecturer of English at New York University and the founding co-editor of The Brooklyn Quarterly, an online magazine of literature and public ideas currently on hiatus. Her writing has appeared in journalistic publications including CNN, the Atlantic, and Slate as well as academic journals.