Sensationalism

Our appetite for true crime is nothing new. The Victorians devoured it and, as Lottie Moggach’s fourth novel shows, they were as gawking and prone to erroneous judgments as any crowd on social media. Mrs Pearcey is about two women in 1890s London: sparky young Hannah Teale, engaged to a rising journalist on the Star and living with her widowed mother in Camden Square; and impoverished Mary Pearcey, who lodges in a Hampstead boarding house and is accused of the grotesque murder of a woman and her baby. It was a celebrated case in its day, coming soon after the Ripper murders, and it is now revived in Moggach’s vivid,

‘The world might condemn me, but what’s the world? A gathering of fools and a pile of prejudices.’ Thus, with all the certainty and absolutism of youth, does the 17-year-old Ariane reflect on the prospect of selling herself. There would be an element of épater les bourgeois in this sentiment in almost any age, but to see it so freely expressed at the dawn of the last century comes as something of a surprise. Written in Russia while its French author chronicled the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, Claude Anet’s Ariane is a striking, if now largely forgotten, account of a young woman’s pursuit of self-realisation in a world