Blurb: In the summer of 1889, young Southern belle Florence Maybrick stood trial for the alleged arsenic poisoning of her much older husband, Liverpool cotton merchant James Maybrick. 'The Maybrick Mystery' had all the makings of a sensation: a pretty, flirtatious young girl; resentful, gossiping servants; rumors of gambling and debt; and torrid mutual infidelity.
The case cracked the varnish of Victorian respectability, shocking and exciting the public in equal measure as they clambered to read the latest revelations of Florence's past and glimpse her likeness in Madame Tussaud's. Florence's fate was fiercely debated in the courtroom, on the front pages of the newspapers and in parlors and backyards across the country. Did she poison her husband? Was her previous infidelity proof of murderous intentions? Was James’ own habit of self-medicating to blame for his demise? Historian Kate Colquhoun recounts an utterly absorbing tale of addiction, deception and adultery that keeps you asking to the very last page, did she kill him?
Katie Waldegrave, The Spectator
“This is a fascinating, meticulously researched book, full of period detail. Colquhoun's success in weaving together a series of complex topics is no mean feat and an even greater achievement is to have presented them clearly and simply… It is hard to keep a hold of Florence's personality when she is recreated largely from the defense and prosecution portraits put forward at her trial and afterwards. And we get too much detail on the precise ins and outs of the trial. Despite this, the book is both dramatic and moving.”
Dinah Birch, The Guardian
“Sensibly, if tantalizingly, Kate Colquhoun offers no final answers in her absorbing review of this old scandal. Instead, she highlights what the case can tell us about late Victorian England – its flawed legal processes and dangerous medical practices, its predatory appetite for gossip, and above all the uncertain position of its women. What Colquhoun reveals is a persistent doubleness – respectability concealing transgression, but also a starting readiness to challenge authority.”
Christopher Hirst, The Independent
“Enlivened by imaginative detail ('The cold chill of brick seen into her back'), Colquhoun's lively and perceptive narrative has the reader rooting for the friendly defendant whose two children were whisked away at the start of the trial by James's brother Michael, her main pursuer Yet there is something cold, unsympathetic and dull about the tightly self-controlled Florence.”
Laura Freeman, Daily Mail
“Colquhoun’s research is exhaustive. No detail of Maybrick's decline or the legal case is left out. Yet in all her reading of her in the archives she has not turned up the killer piece of evidence that the police and the barristers missed first time round. Without it, the trial of Florence Maybrick remains deeply unsatisfying. In an afterword, Colquhoun lists a string of unanswered questions: more than forty-six in all. The case is thrilling, the trial harrowing, and Colquhoun does them justice, but still the frustrating question hangs in the air. Well, did she?”