Thu 8 October
6:30pm
Hallie Rubenhold
Thu 8 October
6:30pm
Hallie Rubenhold
Hallie Rubenhold is the No.1 Sunday Times bestselling and Baillie Gifford prize-winning author of The Five: The Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. A renowned social historian whose expertise lies in revealing stories of previously unknown women and episodes in history, she is the author of The Covent Garden Ladies which was the inspiration behind BBC TV’s ‘Harlots’. Her biographical work, Lady Worsley’s Whim, was dramatized by the BBC as ‘The Scandalous Lady W’. She has also written two acclaimed novels Mistress of My Fate and The French Lesson which give voice to the women written out by eighteenth-century literature.
On 1 February, 1910, vivacious music-hall performer, Belle Elmore, suddenly vanished from her north London home, causing alarm among her circle of female friends, the entertainers of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild who demanded an immediate investigation.
They could not have known what they would provoke: the unearthing of a gruesome secret, followed by a fevered manhunt for the prime suspect: Belle’s husband, medical fraudster, Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen.
Hiding in the shadows of this evergreen tale is Crippen’s typist and lover, Ethel Le Neve – was she really just ‘an innocent young girl’ in thrall to a powerful older man as so many people have since reported?
In this epic examination of one of the most infamous murders of the twentieth century, prizewinning social historian Hallie Rubenhold gives voice to those who have never properly been heard – the women.
UEA Drama Studio, UEA | 6.30pm
‘When Hallie Rubenhold picks up her pen, history comes to life. As in so many forensic cases, the perpetrator is placed in the limelight and the victim in the shadows. Hallie Rubenhold shines a light into those corners and gives the victims the stage they so rightly deserve.’
Professor Sue Black
‘With astonishing depth of research and a finely attuned instinct for entrancing detail, Rubenhold reconstructs the wider truth surrounding a true crime, while composing an indelible portrait of a society on the brink of modernity. An awe-inspiring and truly gripping read.’
Abott Kahler