A PRIVATE DISGRACE: Lizzie Borden by Daylight

During her childhood, Victoria Lincoln asked her mother what it was their near neighbor, Lizzie Borden, had done to make her name a by word among the children. Her mother's answer is a masterpiece: ""Well, dear, she was very unkind to her father and mother."" This author comes equipped to the discussion of New England's classic murder case as no other of its many commentators. In recent years she has located a lost trial record, she can assess the remembered gossip of Lizzie's social equals, and she's a woman. Lizzie's jurors and the men who have considered her case since were not equipped to evaluate her testimony and behavior in regard to the dress that was burned or to the customs that then surrounded menstruation and its evidence, although they are central points in this evaluation. The author heartily believes in Lizzie's guilt and witnessed her punishment; the town that had throbbed for her acquittal kept the ambitious Lizzie in lifelong Coventry. Whether the author's intriguing theory that Lizzie committed the murders in the grip of epileptic seizure is for doctors to debate-- and readers to enjoy. This is the best since Edmund Lester Pearson's vintage book on Lizzie B.--like being the fly on the wall of a gossip center.