See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt
Well known stories told through peripheral characters have become a successful genre all of their own. Jo Baker’s Longbourn, told from the perspective of the below stairs staff in Pride and Prejudice; Geraldine Brooks’ Pulitzer prize winning March, the story of the absent father of the beloved March sisters of Little Women and the recently released Mr. Rochester by Sarah Shoemaker, giving us the backstory of Jane Eyre’s love are just a few.
True crime is another successful genre – books, movies, documentaries, podcasts, we love true crime stories. In her debut novel Sarah Schmidt combines both these genres to retell the story of one of the most sensational murders in American history.
In the summer of 1892, in Fall River Massachusetts, Lizzie Borden was accused of murdering her father and stepmother with an axe. It was a case that captivated the nation and was a bona fide media sensation. She was tried and eventually acquitted mostly because no one could believe that a woman could be guilty of such a heinous crime.
In See What I have Done Schmidt reconstructs the day before and day of the murder through the vantage point of not just Lizzie, the star of the story, but also her older sister Emma, the weary household maid Bridget, and a mysterious thug for hire, Benjamin, retained by the Borden’s maternal uncle John.
Schmidt is not concerned with the whodunit as she is with building a case for a why-dunnit. This is a household that is roiling with tension that is poised to explode during a stifling heatwave. Schmidt lays out the conditions that culminated in this brutal double murder.
Lizzie Borden is the younger spinster sister in the household. She comes across as selfish, spoilt, and an emotionally unstable attention-seeker who appears to have been the favorite child, but is also the focus of her father’s ire. She is manipulative and dependent on her older sister Emma, completely dismissive of her at one moment and unable to survive without her at another. She resents her stepmother and her ability to upset her father is set at a hair trigger. She is portrayed as the most unreliable of narrators infantile and vulnerable one moment, conniving and cogent in another.
Bridget, the maid, has had enough of this stifled, uptight household, she has saved enough money to leave their employ and return to her family in Ireland. Mrs. Borden discovers her plan and takes her tin filled with savings away from her to prevent her from leaving. We learn that Mrs. Borden has treated Bridget as both servant and social companion, perhaps a reflection of her loneliness in this most brittle of households.
Emma, the older sister, is resentful of her younger sister and in fact is away when the murders take place. But she is also so protective of her that even if she suspects her sister, she would protect her. She is stifled by the presence of Lizzie, who even claims Emma’s room and she herself is relegated to a small adjacent room, almost a closet. She cannot escape her sister without leaving the house “Every day I was surrounded by my sister: clumps of auburn hair found on the carpet and in the sink; fingerprints on mirrors and doors; the smell of must hiding in drapes. I would wake with my sister in my mouth, hair strands, a taste of sour milk, like she was possessing me.”
The weakest thread is the character of Benjamin – hired by the Borden uncle John, to teach Andrew Borden a lesson. He is a mercenary and ready to do the job.
The strength of the book is the propulsive and visceral narration of the psychology of the household but most particularly the sensory evocation of the place, “the air, salty thick.” There are times when your stomach will churn as you read how Lizzie “watched blood river down his neck and disappear into suit cloth;” Bridget beating a household rug in the backyard - “Mary handed me the wicker slapper and I took a swing, the thud of wicker like beating an old cow. My mouth filled with dust, all that Borden living. I spat it out;” Emma overhearing the police “’Likely she was the first to go. Found a piece of skull by the radiator across the room.” That made me pause, muscles tighten, and then it happened: my stomach pushed bile from my body again;’” Benjamin at the scene of the murder “The underside piece of skull was colored blood, its flesh still holding onto strands of graying hair.”
It’s not just the descriptions around the murder that are so graphic, the life of the Borden household was just as claustrophobic and nausea inducing thanks to the penny pinching ways of the patriarch – mutton stew stretched for days, lack of indoor plumbing, a house locked up completely, every day, nary a window opened.
Schmidt does not concern herself with the subsequent trial and acquittal of Lizzie Borden, she is mostly focused on the murders themselves. There is no shortage of material out there that deals with every aspect of this most sensational of unsolved murder cases, what Schmidt does is imagine the scene itself. It’s a rip-roaring read that assaults all your senses. You will feel this book in every way possible.
BEFORE YOU READ
Length: 325 pages
Genre: Fiction, mystery, crime
Themes: family dynamics, violence, psychology, murder
Commitment: A compulsive read that you’ll race through.
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