Murder She Wrote
Birmingham Literature Festival
£10 (£8)
Book tickets through Birmingham Literature Festival's website

Birmingham Literature Festival
Murder She Wrote
With Hallie Rubenhold and Jo Baker.
Join writers Hallie Rubenhold and Jo Baker for an in-depth discussion about our obsession with true crime, sexual politics, dead women’s bodies as entertainment, and the ways in which our portrayal of women has evolved (or not) from the Victorian era to the present day.
Jo Baker’s latest novel The Body Lies is a dark, thrilling new novel from the best-selling author of Longbourn. A work of riveting psychological suspense that grapples with how to live as a woman in the world – or in the pages of a book – when the stakes are dangerously high.
Hallie Rubenhold’s latest book The Five is the first full-length biography to explore and contextualize
the lives of the five victims of Jack the Ripper. Offering new insights and drawing on previously unseen or unpublished material, its focus is entirely on the women and not on their murderer.
The Five shares the stories of Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane – all famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. That person responsible was never identified, but the character – Jack the Ripper - created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women.
Chaired by writer and academic Laura Joyce.
Birmingham Literature Festival
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