Cara Robertson, the lawyer/scholar who played Emma Borden in the Stanford University reenactment of the trial, has a book on the Borden case due out soon. The Trial of Lizzie Borden is under contract with Random House and an interview with Robertson appears in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue of “News of the National Humanities Center.”
The article is titled “CSI: Fall River Cara Robertson on Lizzie Borden and Other Crimes” and is long enough to give you some insight into Robertson’s commitment to excellence in scholarship. She is currently in her second year as a National Humanities fellow and is also hard at work on a book about the infamous Elizabeth Canning.
Like the Borden case, Robertson notes, the Canning Affair allowed society—and the media—to test competing narratives in public as they were being contested in a courtroom. Just as Borden’s indictment brought into question prevailing notions of female criminality, Canning’s story coincided with a seismic shift in European culture from belief to knowledge. As intellectuals debated questions of epistemology and evidence, Fielding was attempting to parse truth from fiction by day while creating his own fictional world— one in which he was the sole arbiter of truth—by night.
You can download a PDF of the complete interview here. Thanks to “intrepid reporter” for this find.
