In 1815 cook-maid Eliza Fenning was accused of trying to murder her employer and his family. She went to the gallows in front of a crowd who largely believed she was innocent.
A Q&A session with Catherine Curzon (aka Madame Gilflurt) about my book Women and the Gallows has been published.
Here’s a taster…
What inspired you to choose executed women to write about?
It started when I became interested in Eliza Fenning, a kitchen maid who was executed in London in 1815 for attempting to poison her employer and his family – and who was most probably innocent. She was hanged at a time of great civil unrest and disruption, probably as a warning to the servant class not to challenge the social order. The circumstantial evidence against her was poor and the judge was warned there were serious doubts about her guilt, but he subjected her to a highly biased trial full of irregularities. Generally I’ve always been fascinated by the ‘down and dirty’ end of Georgian history and found that not much had been published recently specifically about the capital punishment of women.
