Beginning her career as a reporter who became known for her coverage of the 1893 Lizzie Borden murder trial, Elizabeth Garver Jordan was a late nineteenth-century “influencer.” She used her platforms as a prominent editor, suffrage activist, and popular mystery author to shape cultural conversations about women’s lives. Like so many overlooked women of the past, she deserves rediscovery for the way her life and work cast new light on the revolutions of her era.
Fortuitously, Jordan is the subject of two recent books, each exploring different parts of the puzzle she represents. This panel of brief presentations and robust discussion will illuminate Jordan’s fascinating life. The panelists will discuss her pioneering work as a woman journalist, the story of how she leveraged her professional reputation to campaign for the woman’s vote, and her prolific career as the author of gripping mystery novels. They will also address Jordan’s personal history, focusing on how she, as an unmarried woman living in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, forged an unconventional, boundary-breaking life, which included a passionate friendship with The Secret Garden author Frances Hodgson Burnett and a rumored marriage proposal from novelist Henry James. Jordan also created a lifelong chosen family by making a home with two other unmarried professional women. Among other adventures, these three intrepid partners adopted and jointly raised a child — whose own daughter, Betsy Devine, now lives in Concord. Betsy will join literary scholars Jane Carr and Lori Harrison-Kahan to explore how the different puzzle pieces of Jordan’s life fit together.
Speakers:
Jane Carr and Lori Harrison-Kahan, co-editors of a Penguin Classics edition of Jordan’s journalism and fiction titled The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings (2024)
Concordian and Jordan’s namesake, Betsy Devine (née Elizabeth Jordan Devine), who will talk about her personal connection to Jordan’s “family of choice.”
Presenter Bios
Jane Carr teaches in the Arts, Communication, and Media program at Fairleigh Dickinson University. With Lori Harrison-Kahan, she is the co-editor of The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings, and her journalism and scholarly writing have appeared in publications including CNN.com, The Atlantic, Slate, Vox, and American Quarterly. She is a former Senior Editor for Ideas at CNN Opinion and recipient of the New York Press Club Award for Online Commentary. She was an American Council of Learned Societies/Mellon Public Fellow at the think tank New America and has taught literature, creative writing, and the humanities at New York University and Manhattanville University.
Betsy Devine (née Elizabeth Jordan Devine) grew up spending summers at Spreadwings in Western Massachusetts, the country house of her namesake, Elizabeth Jordan, whose bedroom and study were lovingly kept exactly as she had left them. One of the first female grad students at Princeton, where she studied engineering, Betsy is the author of two light-heartedly-science books. She is also a singer-songwriter whose poem “If we can keep it here” was one of three ‘highly commended’ by the Concord250 Poetry Project. Betsy is delighted by this chance to share family legends and gossip, with photos besides.
Lori Harrison-Kahan teaches in the English Department at Boston College and has received multiple awards for recovering forgotten literary works by women. In addition to co-editing The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings with Jane Carr, she is the editor of The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson, co-editor of Heirs of Yesterday by Emma Wolf, and co-editor of Matrilineal Dissent: Women Writers and Jewish American Literary History. She is the author of West of the Ghetto: Jewish Women, Old San Francisco, and American Literary Culture and The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary.
