The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings: Tales of a Newspaper Woman

The first and only comprehensive collection of writings by Elizabeth Garver Jordan, the ground-breaking journalist, suffragist, and editor whose fearless reporting on women preceded the #MeToo movement and popularized the true-crime genre.

A Penguin Classic

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.