Alice + Freda Forever
A Murder in Memphis
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Alice + Freda Forever is a gut-wrenching story of love, death, and the dangers of intolerance."—Bustle
In 1892, America was obsessed with a teenage murderess, but it wasn't her crime that shocked the nation—it was her motivation. Nineteen-year-old Alice Mitchell had planned to pass as a man in order to marry her seventeen-year-old fiancée Freda Ward, but when their love letters were discovered, they were forbidden from ever speaking again.
Freda adjusted to this fate with an ease that stunned a heartbroken Alice. Her desperation grew with each unanswered letter—and her father's razor soon went missing. On January 25, Alice publicly slashed her ex-fiancée's throat. Her same-sex love was deemed insane by her father that very night, and medical experts agreed: This was a dangerous and incurable perversion. As the courtroom was expanded to accommodate national interest, Alice spent months in jail—including the night that three of her fellow prisoners were lynched (an event which captured the attention of journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells). After a jury of "the finest men in Memphis" declared Alice insane, she was remanded to an asylum, where she died under mysterious circumstances just a few years later.
Alice + Freda Forever recounts this tragic, real-life love story with over 100 illustrated love letters, maps, artifacts, historical documents, newspaper articles, courtroom proceedings, and intimate, domestic scenes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Coe, a columnist for The Awl, sheds light on one of the most lurid murder trials of the late-19th century, in this lively, provocative history. Prior to January of 1892, Alice Mitchell had planned on wedding her 17-year-old lover, Freda Ward. The two teenagers devised a plan in which Alice would try to pass as a man. But when their love letters were uncovered and the two were separated, a heartbroken Alice brutally murdered her ex-fianc e. As the details of their relationship were revealed during the subsequent media frenzy and trial, the American public struggled to comprehend the then-unspoken-of concept of same-sex love. But as Coe shows, the affair between Alice and Freda started as a socially-acceptable bond between two women, before deepening into something far more profound, bordering on outright insanity (known then as eratomania). Gender politics and societal expectations brought undue pressure on the romance, and Alice's fate (institutionalized, dying soon after from consumption) is somehow mysterious. It's an odd, even unsettling look at cultural attitudes of the 1890s. Coe argues that Alice acted not as a frustrated lesbian, but as a dangerous person just waiting for the right trigger. The author addresses the many cultural issues entangled in the controversy, providing impressively compact, albeit not expansive, coverage of the event. It's a well-written effort that makes the most of its source material on two levels, both as true crime and as social commentary. Illus.
