ABSTRACT
Within the context of American attitudes about spinsters and violence, this chapter analyzes journalist Julian Ralph's trial reportage for the New York Sun. Ralph articulates the case as a public hearing about the marginal status of spinsters and characterizes Lizzie Borden as an innocent woman standing at the mercy of a ruthless group of bloodthirsty local trial-goers, mostly women, who seek the conviction of the Old Maid, as he called Borden. The chapter examines newspaper pieces written by Anna Katharine Green and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, suggesting that their supportive journalistic missives, read in concert with Ralph's characterization of Borden, add to the subtextual conversation about suspicious spinsters at play within the trial. It considers Green's and Phelps's emphases of Borden as an unmarried woman against their literary attitudes about spinsters, as reflected as well in the fiction published by other late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors.
