Jane Carr and Lori Harrison-Kahan in person

The first and only comprehensive collection of writings by Elizabeth Garver Jordan, the groundbreaking 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 M**der trial for the New York World in 1893. Jordan’s distinctive, narrative-driven coverage of the Borden and other high-profile M**der 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.

Elizabeth Garver Jordan (1865-1947) was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After getting her journalism start at New York World in 1890, she went on to cover the Lizzie Borden trial in 1893, published her first collection of short stories in 1898, was the editor of Harper's Bazaar for 13 years, and campaigned for the women's suffrage movement.

Jane Greenway Carr is a writer, editor and scholar who most recently was senior editor for ideas and planning for CNN Opinion, where she steered social and cultural commentary and was a recipient of the 2024 New York Press Club Journalism Award for online commentary. Prior to CNN, she was an ACLS/Mellon Public Fellow at the think tank New America, lectured in the English Department at New York University and was the founding editor of The Brooklyn Quarterly, an online magazine of literature and ideas. Her journalism and scholarly work have appeared in publications including CNN, the Atlantic, Slate, Vox, and American Quarterly.

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.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Odyssey Bookshop, 9 College Street, South Hadley, United States