In celebration of Women’s History Month, Jane Carr and Lori Harrison-Kahan will discuss the life and career of Elizabeth Garver Jordan, the groundbreaking journalist, suffragist, author, and editor whose fearless reporting on women preceded the #MeToo movement and popularized the true-crime genre. As editors of The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings, a Penguin Classics edition of Jordan’s journalism and fiction, Jane and Lori will share their journey to rescue this overlooked feminist figure from history and explore why Jordan’s work, much of which has been out of print for over a century, matters now.

Jordan was one of few women journalists to cover the Lizzie Borden murder trial in New Bedford, Massachusetts, for the New York World in 1893. Jordan’s distinctive, narrative-driven coverage of the Borden and other high-profile murder 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.

In their presentation, Jane and Lori will 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.

Registration is required.

Lori Harrison-Kahan, a Lexington resident, is a professor 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.

Jane Carr is a writer, editor and scholar who teaches in the writing program at Manhattanville University. Most recently, she was senior editor for ideas and planning for CNN Opinion, where she directed social and cultural commentary and was a recipient of the 2024 New York Press Club Journalism Award for online commentary. Prior to joining 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 public ideas. Her journalism and scholarly work have appeared in publications including CNN, the Atlantic, Slate, Vox and American Quarterly. 

Copies of the authors' book are available for purchase through Book Ends in Winchester, MA.

Presented in collaboration with a multitude of libraries in Massachusetts.