216. Elizabeth Garver Jordan — The Case of Lizzie Borden & Other Writings with Jane Carr and Lori Harrison-Kahan

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew, here with my co-host, AMY Helmes, and AMY, I can see by the look on your face that you are excited for this episode.

AMY HELMES: You’re right! I’m going to be geeking out a little more than usual in this episode, because today’s “lost lady” was involved in the murder trial of the century (the 19th century, that is). You know I like my true crime, Kim.

KIM: More than like, but yeah! And although the name Elizabeth Garver Jordan didn’t initially ring any bells for us, when our guests today explained that she famously reported on the trial of Lizzie Borden, we knew — beyond all reasonable doubt — that we needed to know more.

AMY: Jordan was a regular Lois Lane in petticoats while working for Joseph Pulitzer’s The New York World, but she also wrote popular fiction inspired by her job at the city desk, including stories that would set a precedent for the #MeToo movement that erupted a century later. 

KIM: Two of Jordan’s novels were adapted for film, and she later transitioned to a career in editing where she helping shape and steward the works of literary greats like Sinclair Lewis, my thesis buddy Henry James and several “lost ladies” we’ve discussed previously on this podcast: Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Zona Gale.

AMY: That’s cool and all, but I want to talk about Lizzie Borden.

KIM: Okay, it’s time to raid the “cold case” file and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our first guest today, Lori Harrison Kahan, joined us back in 2022, for our episode on Miriam Michelson. (That’s Episode #104 if you want to go back and have a listen). A professor at Boston College, Lori edited a book of Michelson’s work called The Superwoman and Other Writings. She’s also edited a 2020 edition of Heirs of Yesterday by Emma Wolf (another “lost lady” we’ve covered on this show!)  Lori is also the author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black Jewish Imaginary. Lori, good to see you again!

LORI HARRISON KAHAN: It’s so great to be back!

AMY: Our second guest, Jane Greenway Carr, is a former senior opinion editor at CNN digital where she oversaw social and cultural commentary. An adjunct faculty member at Manhattanville University, her writing has also appeared in outlets including Slate, The Atlantic, and American Quarterly. She is also a former Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow and lecturer at New York University and was the co-founding editor of The Brooklyn Quarterly. Jane, welcome to the show, we’re excited to have you!

JANE GREENWAY CARR: Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

AMY: Together, Jane and Lori edited a collection of Elizabeth Garver Jordan’s work called The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings. It was published by Penguin Classics earlier this year, and while the Lizzie Borden material in and of itself is incredible, this selection of her work shows the interconnectedness between Jordan’s life and writing, between her factual reporting and her fiction. 

KIM: That’s right. So, to kick things off, Elizabeth Garver Jordan was born in Milwaukee in 1865. As a young woman she actually had another vocation in mind before launching into journalism. Lori, can you tell us about that and maybe a little more about her early life?

LORI: Sure. So one thing that's important to know about Jordan is that she was raised Catholic, and she attended a convent school called St. Mary's High School in Milwaukee. And that experience was really influential on her entire career. You see it as a thread all the way through all of her writings. She was so influenced by her teachers who were nuns that she decided she, herself, wanted to become a nun. Her parents weren't so thrilled about that, and they ultimately struck a deal with her. She was very talented in so many areas: She was valedictorian of her class (so academically successful), she was a talented writer from a young age, and she was also a talented pianist. and her parents encouraged her to take some time to pursue her secular interests first. And after a year of doing that, if she decided she still wanted to become a nun, they were okay with it. But she ends up beginning to work in journalism after she graduates from high school and really gets the writing and reporting bug, um, and sticks with writing and editing throughout her career.

AMY: It’s like that Amish Ring-sprungah.. Ringsprung…what’s that word?

JANE: Rumspringa.

AMY: Rumspringa, thank you! Like, take a year, check out some other things before you fully commit to a life with God. Okay. So Jane, do we know anything about how she landed at The New York World? Because that's a pretty big deal.

JANE: Absolutely. So Jordan's entry into The New York World, interestingly, does come just a couple of years after Nellie Bly talked her way in and made the world take note. So while Jordan's approach was a little less stunt and spectacle based then Bly’s, you know, the higher-ups of The World were at least acquainted with what women could do in journalism and in the newsroom. So Jordan, as Lori indicated, had experience. She'd been working for papers in the Midwest. She had some clips from The Chicago Tribune. But, uh, she wants (and this gives me an opportunity to describe her memoir, which is not in our book, but is a great read.

It's called Three Rousing Cheers, and it was published in 1938. I highly recommend it.) So she describes both the foresight and the chutzpah that it took to really get in at The New York World. She takes the train to New York, and as her memoir describes it, she goes right to The World office. She asks for the editor, and the way she recalls it later is she says he was impressed by her combination of ambition and ignorance, but she does also say that she talked about the lessons that she learned coming up through her convent school and all of the various challenges, and negotiations that were involved in her education. And she said that looking back, she was probably amusing to him, but he did offer her a tryout. And she really made the most of it. That's something that's really a theme in her career is capitalizing on opportunities. Initially, she gets this tryout. She's kind of shunted off to the Brooklyn office of the paper. She doesn't really like it. She is kind of confined to writing style pieces and things about travel and resorts, but one of those resorts is a place in Cape May where the president's wife and child, who everyone is super curious about, happened to be vacationing. And she talks her way into the first interview where we see access both to the first lady, but also to “Baby McKee,” with whom everyone was obsessed at the time. And the result is a front-page feature that really gets her noticed. And shortly thereafter, she gets a lot of really interesting assignments that she really makes the most of.

AMY: So it’s like getting Meghan Markle or somebody to talk.

JANE: Pretty much, yeah.

AMY: Um, and also, I mean, The New York World, they were one of the few newspapers that really were like, “Hey, there's something to this female journalist. This is going to help us,” right?

JANE: It's gonna help them connect specifically with all of the women readers that they were really trying to get in their orbit.

LORI: And women's subjects, right? Because a man probably couldn't get access to the first lady on the beach in this way that Jordan did.

AMY: Okay, so I can't wait anymore. We have to jump into the Lizzie Borden trial now. It’s time… I’ve read a lot about this case over the years, and I’ve actually visited the Fall River, Mass. home where the crime took place in 1893. The trial was held almost a year later… so relatively early in Jordan’s time at the newspaper. Let me channel my best Keith Morrison voice from “Dateline” to set up the story, but I’m going to use the actual reporting from Elizabeth Garver Jordan’s reporting on the case:

Lizzie D. Borden is a young woman thirty-one years of age who has heretofore led a respected life, who has identified with numerous religious movements, who, according to the testimony of her friends, was kind of heart and thoughtful for the comfort and feelings of others. Did this young woman split open her aged father’s head with a hatchet as he lay sleeping on the sofa, and afterwards go back and batter his face and head with the same weapon that even the doctors who looked upon the hideous sight could hardly command their nerves? Did this same young woman, just before or just after this deed, strike down her stepmother and chop and hack her head and face until it was beaten almost out of human resemblance? Did she do at least one of these horrible deeds within twenty minutes’ time, and was she at the end of that interval able to appear before neighbors she summoned without a spot of blood on her clothing, without a sign of derangement or hasty adjustment of her dress, with the weapon concealed beyond discovery, and not even a scrap of direct evidence to connect her with the deed left undisposed of?

KIM: Good job, Amy. 

AMY: Not quite Keith Morrison, but … 

KIM: It was pretty good. I'm, yeah, I've got the chills.

AMY: I mean, the gore! I mean, that shocking to read!

KIM: It's not demure by any means. 

JANE: No, it is chock full of those details and we see that throughout her reportage on the subject.

KIM: Wow, that is incredible.

LORI: That use of questions is so interesting, too, right? She's formulating it as questions rather than reporting it as fact. And I think that's part of and the imagery there of how she's immersing her audience and getting them to be engaged in the story.

AMY: And I joked about Keith Morrison, but that question-asking is how they still do these kind of crime shows today, right?

LORI: Absolutely.

AMY: So, Jane, every reporter on staff must have been wanting to get to cover this trial. So why did they choose Jordan?

JANE: Well, it was definitely a deliberate choice. One of the things that really stood out to me after reading Cara Robertson's book on the Lizzie Borden trial is how initially it was really only Massachusetts papers who were even granted access to cover it. And The New York World and other New York outlets had to go to court to get special permission.

And so, not only did they assign this to her, but they had to jump through some fairly extensive hoops to get the opportunity. And so what Jordan really, I think, offers to them is a unique perspective as a woman on not only Borden herself, but some of the female witnesses and certainly some of the women who were so interested in seeing the proceedings firsthand that they queue up around the courthouse every day. She offers up her skill as a crafter of narrative. We hear it in all of that robust detail, and we see it in some of her other writings that are included in the collection. And also as a reporter who did already have experience covering high profile murder cases and telling stories in a unique way. The year before the Borden case, she covers the trial of medical student Carlisle Harris in New York, who was tried and convicted and later executed for the murder of his wife. So both her skill, but then also the reader interest of placing a woman in this kind of titillating true crime context… Those in charge of The World really understood and really thought that her insights as a true crime reporter with some experience would be incredibly valuable in this context. And you can really see it when you read some of her coverage.

KIM: So Amy set the stage a little by reading Jordan’s first dispatch from the trial. Can you guys tell us a little bit about her coverage that followed. What’s most remarkable about it in your opinion?

JANE: I think what's most remarkable about it is it's future fiction writer's eye for detail. She notes everything from the curl of the defendant's bangs, she talks about the audible gasp that goes through the courtroom at particularly traumatic moments, notably, when they see the jaw of Andrew Borden's skull, you know. You feel like you're in an episode of “Criminal Minds.” And so she's really only one of the few women assigned to that trial, but she really brings a literary mind to her understanding of the public's obsession. These are also the years where she starts to develop her own voice as a fiction writer, which she then goes on to use in any number of contexts later in her career. So this is kind of, you know, a crucible for a lot of what we see from her later. 

AMY: I know everybody's heard of the Lizzie Borden case, but it really was the OJ Simpson trial of the 19th century, right? Everyone in the country was following it. And her voice is like having a camera in that room, and a microphone, and you hear it all and you can see it, like you said, the curl of her bangs…

LORI: And it's important to keep in mind that this is before photography was included in the daily newspaper, right? So maybe there were some sketches. So she is literally doing the work of the camera and capturing those details. An aspect of the details that stands out to me is her attention to dress. I learned so much about late 19th century fashion from working on this book because I was researching for all the footnotes and there are constant references to calico and cambric, um, Bedford cord, different styles of dress, the cut of the skirt. And you could see (she goes on later to edit a woman's magazine, which involves a lot of fashion writing) and you could see that trajectory from covering the Lizzie Borden trial until that later moment in her career.

KIM: Fascinating. You wouldn't think necessarily that fashion would play a huge part in it. And then you're reading it and you're like, “Whoa.”

AMY: And I think it even plays a little bit in Jordan's opinion about Lizzie Borden's guilt or innocence, because there is a key witness, Miss Alice Russell, that takes the stand, and Jordan describes what she's wearing, and the quote is, “Over her blouse she wears a short jacket, which it would be an excellent idea for to discard. It adds to her height and thinness.” So, we'll talk about what Jordan thought of Lizzie's guilt or innocence in a little bit, but she's casting a little bit of shade on this extremely damning witness against Lizzie Borden. I thought that was fascinating.

LORI: Yes. And there's actually a moment where she's talking about Alice Russell. I'll just read this one sentence because she says as she, Russell, “took the witness stand today, it seemed as though one of the strange women characters with which Wilkie Collins delights and which flit like ominous specters through deep shadows through his mysteries, had walked out of the pages of one of the dead novelist's books and into real life and real participation in a tragedy more awful and more wrapped in obscurity than any he ever evolved.” So she's referencing Wilkie Collins — his most famous novel is The Woman in White. And here, she's kind of saying, like, “this Borden is even stranger and more sensational than that fiction.”

JANE: Yeah. And the drama that she projects there is so, at least to my reading, is so directly correlated to making women readers feel spoken to and seen in relation to the coverage of, you know, this case and particularly considering how gender was such a central factor to how other coverage of Lizzie Borden, you know, how it was constructed. And she speaks to this directly later when she says there are two Lizzie Bordens and one of them was created by the press and the other one is the one I'm looking at. 

KIM: Yeah, I can't even imagine how it must have compared to some of the other reportage because hers is so dramatic and engaging and just fascinating. In fact, I think we should read some more excerpts!

JANE: Okay. This actually is about the women who are watching the proceedings: 

Interest in the trial here in New Bedford has reached such a pitch that elaborate measures are necessary to keep it within bounds in the vicinity of the courtroom. Day by day, the crowds seeking admission have steadily grown until the deputies and policemen who line the stonewalk down from the courthouse through the courthouse yard to the sidewalk have had to be increased in numbers. But even this was found insufficient to restrain the mad fury of the rush for the door when it is announced that so many as can be accommodated will be omitted. There is no fence around the courthouse yard. It is divided from the sidewalk by a low stone wall, the top of which is on a level with the lawn of the yard. The gateway is a mere break in this wall. This is the only access to the front entrance of the building, for along the top of the wall a rope had been strung to keep people from trampling over the lawn.The pressure of the crowd around the gateway at critical hours is something fearful. The worst of it is the crowd is almost entirely composed of women and young girls. Rough handling or shoving or even harsh language is out of the question with such as these.

So here, you know, you really get that sense of who it is who's wanting to see Lizzie. And I just wanted to read just a bit of the introduction to the piece that I was alluding to before about how she says there are two Lizzie Bordens:

There are two Lizzie Bordens. One of them is the very real and very wretched woman who is now on trial for her life in the little courthouse at New Bedford, Mass. The other is a journalistic creation skillfully built up by correspondence and persistently dangled before the eyes of the American people until it has come to be regarded as a genuine personality. This last creature is a human sphinx, a thing without heart or soul. It is large and coarse and heavy. It committed a ghastly double murder in Fall River last August, and it is now stolidly awaiting the result of a trial for that crime. It deserves no sympathy, and receives none. This is the Lizzie Borden of the press. As the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has already spent two weeks in an earnest, but abortive, effort to convict the accused woman of this crime, and as at this time her acquittal seems to be a foregone conclusion, it may be interesting to take a look at the real Lizzie Borden. She will be shown here exactly as she appeared to this writer, who spent two days of the past week in a close study of her face, manner, and character, sitting within touch of her while her trial was going on.

AMY: Yeah, she really does humanize Lizzie a lot. 

KIM: Yeah, whether you think she is guilty or innocent, her descriptions of Lizzie at the trial do give you pause. She describes her face, her hair, her mouth, (even her feet!) — all in such eloquent detail. It’s riveting.

AMY: Yeah, I think that was one of my favorite passages actually from the trial, even though of course you're all into evidence and the witnesses and everything, but it was something as simple as her shoes that was captivating. I'm just going to read this little passage. Garver Jordan sets it up by describing how as soon as Lizzy takes her seat in the courtroom she hooks the heel of one foot over the other. Then she writes:

When the proceedings grow interesting, she changes the position of her feet for several others, each of which indicates exactly her mental attitude at the time it is made. When the prosecution is demonstrating with skulls and hatchets just how the murders were committed, the prisoner sits forward in her chair, and rests on the extreme tips of her toes. When Mr. Adams or ex-Gov. Robinson [those are her lawyers] ties a witness up into a hard knot, she crosses her feet in a comfortable position and rests. Later on she returns to the first position. All this friction is rather hard on the buttons of the boots, but it will be noticed that the button which hangs on its head in a dejected manner during the morning session is proudly and firmly in its place in the afternoon. These movements of Miss Borden’s eloquent feet have scraped almost all the paint from the rungs of the chair which she occupies.

I mean, the detail of that, the micro within the macro of this legal circus and juxtaposing something as banal as the button on her shoes with the gore and the shock value of the murders. It's brilliant to me. And I also can picture her hearing from her editor, like, “Write as much copy as you can,” so maybe that's a day when it's kind of boring and she's like, “What am I going to write?” And she's like, “Okay, let me do this description of her starting from her hair to her mouth to her dress all the way down to her shoes.”

LORI: That detail of the button… I mean, part of it is that she's using the button as kind of a symbol for Borden's psychological state, or what you would imagine her psychological state to be, and how it's shifting. But the other thing that's interesting about that is that because the button's falling off in the morning and sewn on in the afternoon, so she's kind of filling in what might be happening when Borden's not in the courtroom, right? She doesn't have access as a journalist to her outside the courtroom, but this is a way to kind of suggest what might be going on.

KIM: And that she takes care of her things, too. 

AMY: She’s an upper class, fastidious woman, know, how can you possibly believe that she's capable of committing these crimes?

JANE: And it almost gives her a layer of femininity that other representations of Borden were trying to strip away. You know, she's written about as being devoid of emotion or somehow strange or “other” or not even a real woman, and we see how that plays out in some of the interpretations of Borden as a character that transpire after this and well into the 20th century. But even just at the micro level of the way she treats her shoes, you get that sense of Borden's femininity in a very real, direct and detailed way.

AMY: One of the notes I put while reading all of this trial stuff was: I wish she was still around to cover trials today. I mean, I would love to read her coverage of the E. Jean Carroll case, or something like that. 

JANE: Yeah! 

KIM: Yeah. For sure.

KIM: So in this writing, Jordan seemed to come down on the side of Lizzie’s innocence, don’t you think?

JANE: I mean, she writes so assertively about her humanity, and she's most critical not of how she's framed in terms of being guilty or innocent but just, I think she has her harshest criticisms for how other coverage portrays Borden. And her main focus is in humanizing her rather than giving some kind of definitive statement on her innocence or guilt, but she does write in pretty open terms about the lack of evidence and some of the main problems in how the prosecution presents its case. 

LORI: She does, in her autobiography… I'm pretty sure that there, she maintains that she thought Borden was innocent.

JANE: Another reason to read Three Rousing Cheers. 

KIM: For sure. For sure.

AMY: Like I said at the beginning, I have done a lot of deep diving into this case, and I was not expecting to learn anything new. I really did! I got new stuff out of this that I had not heard of before even. And I'm sure you guys also kind of went down the internet rabbit hole a little bit. I read her whole interrogation interview. I sat down and read that whole thing because I was just like, “I need to know. I need to solve this crime!” So what are your guys thoughts? Should I go first on whether we think she really did it or not?

KIM: Do it, Amy.

JANE: Go for it.

AMY: I think the evidence is non-existent, right? There's nothing they can pin on her. I absolutely think she did it. I absolutely think she did it. And I think Bridget, the housemaid, cannot be believed. If you believe Bridget, then you have to believe the timeline of the murder. I didn't believe Bridget, therefore I didn't believe the timeline, therefore I think that she could have cleaned up everything and gotten away with it. And it's a crime of passion to stab somebody like that. I think there was some serious rage that came out. She burned that dress! Why'd you burn the dress two days later or whenever that was? Okay.

KIM: Yeah, those are some compelling reasons.

AMY: Anybody else can disagree with me…I'm curious to hear what you think. 

LORI: I agree with you. That's the experience I have from reading the details of the reporting, but also the kind of absence of there being any other possible suspect in the case. I think it's so interesting, right, that you read her reporting and you come away thinking she's probably guilty, and yet Jordan herself, who did the reporting, is saying she's innocent.

AMY: Yeah, that's interesting. That's a good point.

KIM: Yeah, but it feels like almost what you were saying earlier, Jane. It's maybe not so much guilt or innocence, but that she didn't think she should have been convicted of it. 

JANE: It's so impossible for me to separate what I think about the case from what I know and what I've studied about the various ways that she's been interpreted in every format, from experimental film and theater to there was a ballet adaptation that was performed in the mid-20th century by some very well known and dancers. And so that sense of obsession with “did she or didn't she,” coupled with the difficulty with the case and with, you know, how it was covered. I almost can't even get there to “did she or didn't she,” because it's just, you know, the view of her and what she means culturally is so fraught and so crowded with other concerns that my mind can’t get there.

KIM: Yeah. 

JANE: I mean, I absolutely recognize the logic… as it happens, my partner is a lawyer, so I recognize the logic and the legal reasoning behind, Amy and Lori, what you're saying. But for me, it's hard even to get there. I mean, not only did she not really, in some ways, have a fair trial in the court of public opinion, she hasn't had a fair trial in the court of public culture or discourse for, you know, the last century and more. So it's really hard for me to get there.

AMY: Whether you think she did it or not, There was no evidence to convict her on. I think the decision was the right one, based on what was available. So Elizabeth Garver Jordan's published fiction later led readers to wonder if this reporter had more scoop than she was actually telling at times with regard to the Lizzie Borden case. So let's talk about her story, “Ruth Herrick's Assignment.” It's fascinating.

JANE: So this is a story that she publishes in Cosmopolitan, and she says later that it's a story she began before her coverage of the Lizzie Borden trial. But essentially the story, and it's a wonderful read (it's quite short) essentially is about a reporter who has a conversation with a woman accused of murder. She's a sympathetic figure to the reporter. She confesses her guilt, and the reporter keeps her secret. And so this comes out both in a moment after the Lizzie Borden trial with which Jordan's name was associated and it also comes out at a moment when Jordan’s star is really on the rise as a fiction writer. So the double contributions of those things really kind of set a fire underneath this story, and the reader interest, of course, was immense. 

LORI: It's a work of fiction, right? And people were reading this and saying, “Borden confessed to Elizabeth Jordan and Jordan suppressed it?” The other, I think, important piece of this is that the reason the reporter in the story doesn't print the confession is because she finds out that the woman killed her husband, after years of abuse, of abusing her and her mother. It's also a story about female solidarity, which is a thread through much of. Jordan's work.

JANE: And also the knowledge that other women know that women who tell stories of that nature often aren't believed, particularly by institutions of power, be they the criminal justice system or, you know, other institutions of power in society.

 KIM: So let's talk about the story “The Cry of the Pack.” It was written in 1914, preceding, obviously, the #MeToo movement by almost a century, but it's pretty incredible that she was writing in this way about sexual predation. So do you want to talk a little bit about that? 

LORI: This was actually the story that made me want to work on this collection. I was teaching a course on American women writers in 2017 Right as the #MeToo movement was beginning, and I was teaching actually another work by Jordan. It's called The Sturdy Oak, which is a composite novel that she created and edited. So each chapter is written by a different person. But Jordan writes the preface to that book. And in that book, there's kind of #MeToo throughline where a character is being sexually harassed throughout the narrative. And my students and I were just fascinated by this book published in 1917. And then I started to investigate more of Jordan's writings and discovered that she has these, what we would call now #MeToo moments throughout all her writings, including “The Cry of the Pack.” I know you had pulled a passage. Does someone want to read from it?

AMY: Yeah, I think we have to read a little bit from this, and I think our listeners are going to realize that this does not seem like an early 20th century piece of writing at all. This is Mae Iverson talking about the type of men that she encounters at work, and she admits to the reader: 

I was becoming afraid — not of work, but of men…The worst of my fear now was that I didn’t know exactly why I felt it, and there was no one I could go and ask about it. All the men I met seemed to be divided into two classes. In the first class were those who were not kind at all — men like Mr. Hurd, who treated me as if I were a machine, and ignored me altogether or looked over my head or past the side of my face when they spoke to me. They seemed rude at first, and I did not like them; but I liked them better and better as time went on. In the second class were the men who were too kind — who sprawled over my desk and wasted my time and grinned at me and said things I didn’t understand and wanted to take me to Coney Island. Most of them were merely silly, but two or three of them were horrible. When they came near me they made me feel queer and sick. After they had left I wanted to throw open all the doors and windows and air the room.

KIM: She gets the “ick factor” just right in this! So as this story proceeds Miss Iverson gets put on an assignment that will test her ability to deal with a man like this second type she described. It’s pretty gross and chilling… and unexpected.

JANE: It does not sound like 1914. I think for anyone who has read these stories, lived these stories, known people who have lived these stories, it feels incredibly immediate. 

LORI: This is really how Jane and I connected on this collection. So when the Miriam Michaelson book came out, Miriam Michaelson's work… (I think I spoke about it with you guys on the episode)... also has these #MeToo moments in it. And she also was a journalist who used fiction as a means of exploring what happened to women in the newsroom, something she couldn't address in her journalism. And I pitched to Jane — we knew each other a little bit before —I pitched her at CNN, an op-ed piece about Michelson, Jordan and some other writers who I was reading as the precedents or the seeds of #MeToo. Jane ended up editing my piece, and we discovered through that that Jane had written a dissertation chapter on Jordan. And so we really connected over our love of Jordan, and that became the seeds of this project. 

AMY: I love that. 

KIM: Let’s touch on the next phase of her career, because she transitioned from writing into editing, both magazine and literary publishing. What should we know?

JANE Well, two things that I think are really important. These are the parts of her career where we see her most visibly engaged in activism, particularly suffrage activism, and we also see her most involved in some brightest and boldest literary names of the time. So she goes from working at The World to editing Harper's Bazaar for the first decade of the 20th century at just such a key moment when expectations around gender are changing the New Woman. And as Lori had alluded in some of her Borden coverage, an opportunity to really think in different ways about the form and function of fashion for sure. But we also see her involved in a kind of literary innovation. She's involved with William Dean Howells in creating another composite novel that precedes The Sturdy Oak called The Whole Family, and we see Elizabeth Stewart Phelps, we see Mary Wilkins Freeman, we see Henry James, and we also see in her correspondence from the time, a real understanding of what it meant to develop relationships with those writers as a collaborator, but also as an editor. It's not always fun. There's a lot of cat-herding that goes into it, but we also see her awareness of editorial work as something with a great deal of power, but also a great deal less visibility than what she was accustomed to as a fiction writer and a journalist. And that's something that Lori and I also confronted in our own scholarly understanding of what it is to make editorial labor visible. The critic Sarah Blackwood has a fantastic essay, which I highly recommend from, I believe, Avidly, on editing as “care work.” And that can mean behind the scenes unacknowledged labor, but also the curating labor of really investing both a nurturing sense in, you know, more of a traditionally gendered way, but also, you know, there's a real power in determining how something is presented and the conversation that it intervenes in. And so we see that happening in a literary way, with The Whole Family in 1908, but we certainly see it happening in a political sense, with The Sturdy Oak, during the late suffrage movement a decade later. She also is very involved, when Harper's Bazaar sold to Hearst in 1913. She stays on with Harper and Brothers as a literary editor.

She helps launch the careers of writers, including Sinclair Lewis. She signs his first novel in the 19-teens, which is pretty amazing. And she's also involved as both an editor and ghostwriter for suffrage legend, the Reverend. Anna Howard Shaw's book about her life, The Story of a Pioneer. And that of course is happening at a moment in 1915 when there are a lot of conversations going on about how the suffrage movement understands itself and how it helped shape women's political identities in the 19-teens. And Jordan really has kind of a front-row seat to that. You can see her really negotiating both the politics of women's lives and how that relates to her, but you can also really see her negotiating the politics of visibility, both as an editor and as an activist.

LORI: And this was one of the challenges for us as editors of this volume — to make editorial work visible, right? Because it is invisible labor, right? The name of the author goes on, but not the name of the editor necessarily. And so the final section of the book contains excerpts from Anna Howard Shaw's autobiography. It's called The Story of a Pioneer. It may seem like an odd move, right? Because it's written by Shaw. But even the title page says this is written in collaboration with Elizabeth Garver Jordan, because Jordan was the one who went to her and commissioned it and said, you need to write this and ended up basically, kind of ghost writing it in many ways, right? She had Shaw dictate it to her. But you see Jordan's fingerprints all over it, and so that was why we've included it. And also because we think it's one way that in a volume like this, you can make editorial labor visible.

JANE: Absolutely, and I'll just add to that as a fun tidbit. If you look on the cover of our book, there is little “OK EJ” in blue, and that is taken from one of the final pass pages of the title page of The Sturdy Oak. Jordan has initialed it as, you know, “I've looked this over and this is okay.” So for us, it was just a very small way to celebrate that element of her career. Leaving it to invisibility is not, you know, something that we're comfortable with.

AMY: Yeah, and actually, this part of your book made me think about another “lost lady” of lit that we'll be featuring on the show in early 2025. Katharine White who was one of the…

JANE: Yes!

AMY: … first editors at The New Yorker and that whole idea … she was married to E. B. White, but of course nobody knows her name even though she was a huge deal and she was the steward of all these amazing writers like Dorothy Parker, um, she helped usher them through The New Yorker and into being amazing artists in their own right. But that idea of being a caretaker really resonated with the biography by Amy Reading that I'm reading about her because she's very much like a mother figure in a lot of ways in helping to guide authors. That was part of the skill that made her so good, you know?

JANE: Yeah. We've been in conversation with Amy and are doing an event with her at the Grolier Club.

AMY: Oh, perfect, because yes, there is such a good nexus there. I instantly thought of Katharine when I was reading your book, so that's perfect.

JANE: And I'm reading Amy's book right now, too. We can compare notes.

AMY: Yeah. It’s good! 

 KIM: So with Garver Jordan's novels, do you have recommendations for other ones? Have you read all of them? Or some of them?

LORI: So I will just say The Sturdy Oak, I really think it's a must read, in addition to our volumes. The Sturdy Oak is in print. It's pretty easy to get. Technically, she edited it, but she only really wrote one page, which is the preface. But in that one page, her voice and her humor and her passion for suffrage just all comes across. It makes all my students who read it want to go on and read more Jordan. so I recommend that. And then she became a golden age mystery novelist, so drawing on her background in true crime. And she's incredibly prolific. So there are a lot of novels. There's a scholar right now working on her biography named Sharon Harris. Sharon has read all these mystery novels, and she recommended one to me, which is called The Lady of Pentlands. So that's the one that I've read. It's not easy to get a hold of. It took, like, multiple months of inter-library loan back and forth, but what's fascinating about it is that the heroine is a single woman. That's something that we haven't emphasized about Jordan's own biography; that she was single throughout her life. She didn't have children. She made a family with other working women, and I think that's a really important part, not just of her career, but also of her fiction. That we get all these possibilities for women of how they can lead their lives outside of traditional heterosexuality and domesticity.

KIM: That’s a great point in her story. I'm glad you brought that up.

JANE: Definitely. So am I. And I just have to quickly add in that Sharon Harris co edited with Ellen Gruber Garvey, a book called Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands about the invisible work of women editors, which was one of the inspiring texts that made me want to write my entire dissertation about women editors. So I just want to give a shout out both to Sharon for her work on Jordan, but also that book given, um, given why we’re all here. 

KIM: Oh, great. We'll link to that in our show notes. 

AMY: That’s a perfect segue to us giving you two some accolades for this book. And listeners, just to remind you, the book is called The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings. I came to your book for the Lizzie Borden content, and I thought to myself, “Let me just be polite and read the other works.” No, it is all really good! I enjoyed all of Elizabeth Garver Jordan's stories, and I didn't expect to. I thought I would just enjoy the Lizzie Borden dirt but not have as much interest in the other stuff, but I'm just as interested in all of the other things she wrote. It really does not disappoint. So thank you for coming today and helping to put it all into context. 

JANE: Thank you for having us. This was a blast.

LORI: It was so great to be back with you.

AMY: If you are a paid subscriber to this podcast, which you can do through Apple Podcasts or Patreon to receive two extra episodes a month, then join me back next week for our bonus episode. I've got a fun little movie recommendation and review for you all, and I'm going to also talk about the true story that inspired it. 

KIM: And Amy and I will both be back in two weeks to discuss Margaret Drabble's The Millstone with guest Carrie Mullins. Goodbye for now and keep those five-star reviews coming our way. We love to see them.

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.