Hanging

Ruth Ellis was, as everyone knows, the last woman in Britain to be hanged – her case a catalyst for the abolition of the death penalty. But is the story we are all so familiar with the whole one? Louisa Treger, a seasoned teller of tales of extraordinary women, brings Ellis to life in a new novel. A Fatal Love presents us with a remarkable woman who committed a remarkable crime. In 1955, when Ellis shot her lover David Blakely outside a pub in Hampstead, domestic violence was seen by the police as a ‘private matter’. ‘Coercive control’ had yet to be coined as a term, and was half a century from being criminalised. In this literary, dialogue-driven thriller, we learn that Ellis’s violent, alcoholic father had also sexually abused her.

In the three centuries between 1450 and 1750 in Europe it is estimated that up to 100,000 women were burned, hanged, drowned or put to death in other ingenious ways on suspicion of being witches. John Callow’s thoroughly researched book tells the story of three such women, the last judicial victims in England of what has been dubbed ‘the great European witch craze’. Craze is an appropriate word for a phenomenon which spanned a period when the Continent was supposedly emerging from the dark ages of superstition into the sunlight of the Enlightenment. But in the dawning Europe of Kant, Voltaire and Newton a cloud of unreason persisted, of which the Bideford witch trial was a small but significant example.