On 18 November 1910, 300 women marched on the Houses of Parliament to demand the right to vote. Their protest was met with shameless brutality: punches, kicks, beatings and sexual assault from policemen and male bystanders. Three weeks earlier, a young woman named Ethel Le Neve had been tried for her part in the most sensational crime of the new century, the ‘London Cellar Murder’. The portrait of Le Neve presented by her barrister had been one of ‘perfect Edwardian feminine innocence’, docile, gentle, lacking in agency – a reassuring contrast to the strident, determined suffragettes, whose refusal to conform to societal expectations were to culminate in the attacks at Westminster. The suffragettes had their jaws broken; Le Neve walked free. Five days later, Le Neve’s lover, Hawley Harvey Crippen, was hanged at Pentonville prison for killing his wife, whose remains had been found at their home, 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Holloway.
The Crippen case was a worldwide phenomenon, played out breathlessly in real time across the Atlantic. As Hallie Rubenhold observes in this superlative new study, it also represented a watershed moment, a collision of the past with the future. While Crippen’s conviction was secured through the application of cutting-edge technologies (the telegraph, photography, toxicology), Le Neve’s release depended on a dated fiction of female helplessness, which proved more appealing to the jury than the facts of her involvement in the case.
In The Five, which won the Baillie Gifford prize in 2019, Rubenhold triumphantly reclaimed the life stories of Jack the Ripper’s victims. Story of a Murder similarly sets out to deprive Crippen of his starring role in a historical narrative which primarily concerns women but has been almost exclusively dominated by men.
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