Scan barcode
A review by mwgerard
The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne by Kate Winkler Dawson
challenging
informative
mysterious
medium-paced
4.5
Full review: https://www.mwgerard.com/review-sinners-all-bow/
On a freezing morning in December 1832, a woman named Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead on a local farm - but was it murder, or suicide?
On a freezing morning in December 1832, a woman named Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead on a local farm - but was it murder, or suicide?
The farm owner, John Durfee, didn't recognize her. She was one of many itinerant mill workers who were largely anonymous and interchangeable in northeast America's industrial revolution. Thousands of people, many of them women, who would have been relegated to farm- and housework in or near their hometown were now travelling to mill towns springing up along rivers in New England. While it offered a modicum of independence, it was hardly a glamorous life. Wages were meager, hours were long, machinery was dangerous, and the living conditions afforded by the salary were humble. Still, it was an option for widows, or other women that had few choices. and it hadn't existed 20 years previously.
Sarah was one of these mill workers and when the townspeople began to look into her death, they found a number of tantalizing clues. She had kept letters in a locked trunk. It became clear that she attended a number of Methodist revival camps and was carrying on a secret correspondence with a Reverend Avery.
Author Kate Winkler Dawson has an incredible talent for finding mysteries and laying them out (see my review of American Sherlock). The reason this case, is particularly intriguing is that Dawson is not the first true crime writer to try to find answers. That title belongs to Catharine Read Arnold Williams, who covered the trial, then interviewed witnesses, and visited locations, including the Durfee Farm (at night, so it would be as similar to the crime's setting as possible). An outspoken supporter of women's suffrage and a woman who left her dreadful husband, she published Fall River in 1833, just months after Cornell was found. She noted that this small town was curiously afflicted with gruesome murder, citing the infamous Borden killings. As well as being the first published American true crime narrative, Williams' account is often credited as the inspiration for Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.
Author Kate Winkler Dawson has an incredible talent for finding mysteries and laying them out (see my review of American Sherlock). The reason this case, is particularly intriguing is that Dawson is not the first true crime writer to try to find answers. That title belongs to Catharine Read Arnold Williams, who covered the trial, then interviewed witnesses, and visited locations, including the Durfee Farm (at night, so it would be as similar to the crime's setting as possible). An outspoken supporter of women's suffrage and a woman who left her dreadful husband, she published Fall River in 1833, just months after Cornell was found. She noted that this small town was curiously afflicted with gruesome murder, citing the infamous Borden killings. As well as being the first published American true crime narrative, Williams' account is often credited as the inspiration for Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.