Lizzie Borden Fiction Bests
If you enjoy reading about Lizzie Borden, can’t get enough to satisfy your interest in the case, have you tried reading fiction about the case?
There are some rather creative and well-conceived stories centering on Lizzie Borden that you may not know about.
Here are a few we recommend.
Lizzie Borden, The Girl with the Pansy Pin
By Michael Thomas Brimbau
Lizzie Borden and her sister Emma lived a life of privilege and entitlement, with wealth and social status far beyond their neighbors. But most pleasures were just window dressing, dangling beyond their reach. Riches were kept quarantined by a frugal patriarch, unable or unwilling to change his scrimping ways. As they became older, Lizzie and her sister grew restless, aching for a more opulent life—to reside on the Hill, in a big house, amongst their peers, and Fall River’s finest families. Now their father was planning to give all his wealth away—to his wife, no doubt. And, why not? Abby Durfee Borden had been a devoted mother to his two ungrateful daughters. Andrew Jackson Borden had no intention of moving to the Hill or abandoning the home he had purchased for his wife. Discord and turmoil soon began to ferment and fester.
Lizzie expressed concern that “Father has enemies and I fear that they will burn the house down around us.”
On a sultry August morning, in the naked light of day, someone entered 92 Second Street and brutally hacked and murdered Andrew and Abby Borden. Soon the finger of guilt pointed to Lizzie. But she loved her father. He meant everything to her. The gold ring she had lovingly given him and that he always wore said as much. She would never have harmed him. Or would she?
The Girl with the Pansy Pintells the gripping story of a desirable and vivacious young Victorian woman desperately longing for adventure and a lavish life. Instead, she wasted away in a stale, modest existence, in a father’s foregone reality, one with little chance of ever discovering love, happiness, or fulfillment. Now they have charged poor Lizzie with double murder.
Maplecroft: The Borden Dispatches
by Cherie Priest
The people of Fall River, Massachusetts, fear me. Perhaps rightfully so. I remain a suspect in the brutal deaths of my father and his second wife despite the verdict of innocence at my trial. With our inheritance, my sister, Emma, and I have taken up residence in Maplecroft, a mansion near the sea and far from gossip and scrutiny.
But it is not far enough from the affliction that possessed my parents. Their characters, their very souls, were consumed from within by something that left malevolent entities in their place. It originates from the ocean’s depths, plaguing the populace with tides of nightmares and madness.
This evil cannot hide from me. No matter what guise it assumes, I will be waiting for it. With an axe.
By Richard Behrens
Introducing Miss Lizzie Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts, a most excellent girl detective and the most remarkable young woman ever to take on the criminal underworld in late 19th century New England. Many years before her infamous arrest and trial for the murders of her father and stepmother, Lizzie Borden pursued a career as a private consulting detective and wrestled unflinchingly with a crooked spiritualist, a corrupt and murderous textile tycoon, a secret society of anarchist assassins, rowdy and deadly sporting boys, a crazed and vengeful mutineer, an industrial saboteur, and a dangerously unhinged math professor—none of whom are ever exactly what they seem to be. In these five early tales of mystery and adventure, Lizzie Borden is joined by her stubborn and stingy father Andrew; her jealous and weak-chinned sister Emma; her trusted companion Homer Thesinger the Boy Inventor; and the melancholy French scion Andre De Camp. Together, they explore Fall River’s dark side through a landscape that is industrial, Victorian, and distinctly American. You have met Lizzie Borden before! But never like this!
COMING SOON!
By Brandy Purdy
In her enthralling, richly imagined new novel, Brandy Purdy, author of The Ripper’s Wife, creates a compelling portrait of the real, complex woman behind an unthinkable crime. Lizzie Borden should be one of the most fortunate young women in Fall River, Massachusetts. Her wealthy father could easily afford to provide his daughters with fashionable clothes, travel, and a rich, cultured life. Instead, haunted by the ghost of childhood poverty, he forces Lizzie and her sister, Emma, to live frugally, denying them the simplest modern conveniences. Suitors and socializing are discouraged, as her father views all gentleman callers as fortune hunters. Lonely and deeply unhappy, Lizzie stifles her frustration, dreaming of the freedom that will come with her eventual inheritance. But soon, even that chance of future independence seems about to be ripped away. And on a stifling August day in 1892, Lizzie’s long-simmering anger finally explodes… Vividly written and thought-provoking, The Secrets of Lizzie Bordenexplores the fascinating events behind a crime that continues to grip the public imagination—a story of how thwarted desires and desperate rage could turn a dutiful daughter into a notorious killer.
The Borden Murders: Lizzie Borden and the Trial of the Century
By Sarah Miller
Here’s middle-grade nonfiction that reads like a thriller. With murder, court battles, and sensational newspaper headlines, the story of Lizzie Borden is compulsively readable and perfect for the Common Core.
Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.
In a compelling, linear narrative, Miller takes readers along as she investigates a brutal crime: the August 4, 1892, murders of wealthy and prominent Andrew and Abby Borden. The accused? Mild-mannered and highly respected Lizzie Borden, daughter of Andrew and stepdaughter of Abby. Most of what is known about Lizzie’s arrest and subsequent trial (and acquittal) comes from sensationalized newspaper reports; as Miller sorts fact from fiction, and as a legal battle gets under way, a gripping portrait of a woman and a town emerges.
With inserts featuring period photos and newspaper clippings—and, yes, images from the murder scene—readers will devour this nonfiction book that reads like fiction.
Chapelwood: The Borden Dispatches
By Cherie Priest
From Cherie Priest, the award-winning author of Maplecroft, comes a new tale of Lizzie Borden’s continuing war against the cosmic horrors threatening humanity…
Birmingham, Alabama is infested with malevolence. Prejudice and hatred have consumed the minds and hearts of its populace. A murderer, unimaginatively named “Harry the Hacker” by the press, has been carving up citizens with a hatchet. And from the church known as Chapelwood, an unholy gospel is being spread by a sect that worships dark gods from beyond the heavens.
This darkness calls to Lizzie Borden. It is reminiscent of an evil she had dared hoped was extinguished. The parishioners of Chapelwood plan to sacrifice a young woman to summon beings never meant to share reality with humanity. An apocalypse will follow in their wake which will scorch the earth of all life.
Unless she stops it…