Lady Killers Live at Hay Festival

Sarah joined Lucy Worsley earlier this year, at Hay Literature Festival, to record the first in a new series of Lady Killers, which you can now hear on BBC Sounds. 

They explore the lives of women like Edith Thompson, a jumping off point for Sarah’s own The Paying Guests; then there’s Maria Manning who was reincarnated as an ‘imperfectly tamed’ French maid Hortense by Charles Dickens in his proto-detective story, Bleak House and lastly, Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman on the run immortalised in Tony Morrison’s Beloved.

Can historical fiction actually communicate more than factual history? What makes for a good baddie? Lady Killers: Murder by the Book brings a contemporary feminist perspective to crime as it happened and as it’s reimagined on the page.

Listen back to the conversation here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002njw7