The Only One Left

When Kit McDeere first learns the identity of her new patient, she compares Lenora Hope to the real-life historical figure Lizzie Borden. The comparison is apt: Both women are remembered through the lens of horrific murders that destroyed their reputations. Just as Lizzie Borden’s lived experiences have been reduced to a catchy, ghoulish rhyme, so too does the novel invent playground doggerel about Lenora.

In 1892, Lizzie Borden was tried for the axe murders of her father and stepmother in their Fall River, Massachusetts, home. She was acquitted by a jury of 12 white men, who were convinced that she could not have hacked anyone to death. Social historians and criminal analysts have revisited the Borden case, employing new forensic techniques and social science conjecture. Historians now agree that Lizzie had an obvious motive and was the only person who could have committed both killings without being seen fleeing the premises.

Like Lenora, Lizzie gained the public’s fascination and contempt overnight. The press avidly followed the case, stoking public indignation about the role of women in turn of the 20th century America. Though Lenora is the product of a different historical period, the end of the Roaring Twenties, Lenora’s world far more closely resembled that of her parents’ Edwardian generation than that of the early 20th century, when women were slowly edging toward social liberation. Thus, her experiences even more closely mirrored those of the historical Lizzie.

Both women were outside the rigid parameters of appropriate behavior dictated by a patriarchal society, especially as young women from prominent and affluent families. Both violated the image of the good daughter—one who obeys her parents with gratitude. The idea that they killed their parents was thus as socially offensive as the gruesome murders themselves. Not enough evidence existed to convict either woman, but both became pariahs in their communities, tainted by the specter of suspicion at a time when purity was valued above all other traits in women. Still, Lizzie’s acquittal and the lack of indictment brought against Lenora indicate a societal conflict: The lurid possibility that a woman could be capable of such violence was at odds with the idea of women as weak and passive.

After their notoriety died down, both women retreated to their own private worlds: Lizzie resided in Maplecroft among an eclectic group of artist friends, and Lenora was sequestered in the gilded prison of Hope’s End. These self-imposed exiles allowed generations of locals to revel in the grotesque voyeurism the women’s continued proximity permitted.