The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne

ISBN: 0593949110

Author: Dawson, Kate Winkler

Condition: New

Acclaimed journalist, podcaster, andtrue-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson tells the true story of the scandalous murder investigation that became the inspiration for both Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter and the first true-crime book published in America.On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead in a quiet farmyard in a small New England town. When her troubled past and a secret correspondence with charismatic Methodist minister Reverend Ephraim Avery was uncovered, more questions emerged. Was Sarahs death a suicide...or something much darker? Determined to uncover the real story, Victorian writer Catharine Read Arnold Williams threw herself into the investigation as the trial was unfolding and wrote what many claim to be the first American true-crime narrative, Fall River. The murder divided the country and inspired Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter-but the reverend was not convicted, and questions linger to this day about what really led to Sarah Cornells death. Until now.In The Sinners All Bow, acclaimed true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson travels back in time to nineteenth-century small-town America, emboldened to finish the work Williams started nearly two centuries before. Using modern investigative advancements-including forensic knot analysis and criminal profiling (which was invented fifty-five years later with Jack the Ripper)-Dawson fills in the gaps of Williamss research to find the truth and bring justice to an unsettling mystery that speaks to our past as well as our present, anchored by three women who subverted the script they were given.