It’s been 125 years since Borden’s father and stepmother were hacked to death.
So why do we still care so much?
More than a century on, the legend of a mad blade-wielding spinster persists.
Credit: Atlantic Monthly Press; Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Shes also a bratbossy, petulant, and rude.
(And the resources to find her own escape as the houseguest of a sympathetic friend.)
The table of misery is set, but is there motivation enough for murder?
It would spoil Schmidts literary game to say too much.
What she does do, in dense, swooning paragraphs, is build an indelible mood.
Father wouldve hated it, would have told me I was uncouth.
I ate everything up, ate his money, was delightful everywhere I went.
Schmidts style has its quirks.
The vast gaps in her characters education and experience somehow still allow them to share the same distinctive voice.
Maybe she was unhinged, or perfectly sane; maybe she was framed, or should have run away.
The only fact that seems immutably true is that Lizzie Borden wanted more than anything to be free.
What she got instead was infamy.A-
