Hallie Rubenhold’s The Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress and Dr Crippen restages one of Edwardian Britain’s most sensational crimes—the 1910 killing of music hall performer Belle Elmore by her husband, the homeopath Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen—as a multi-voiced social history. This is not a book about Crippen the murderer, but about the world that made him, and the women caught in his orbit. Rubenhold, best known for The Five, where she reconstructed the lives of Jack the Ripper’s victims, again refuses the lure of the criminal anti-hero. Her aim is to decentre Crippen and recentre the story on Belle, her colleagues in the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild, and the secretary-turned-mistress Ethel Le Neve. She writes of “an ensemble cast,” insisting that the murder “creates a fixed snapshot of an era” and that the task of the historian is to read beneath the spectacle, into the sedimented layers of class, gender, aspiration and shame.
Rubenhold’s prose is rich in atmosphere and detail, drawing on newspapers, letters, memoirs and trial records to evoke the worlds these women moved through, provincial theatres and shared lodging houses, smoky parlours and overcrowded boarding schools, Hackney villas and Edwardian charwomen’s gripes. The familiar outlines of the case are present, the vanished wife, the torso in the cellar, the escape aboard the Montrose, the wireless telegram that sealed Crippen’s fate, but they are submerged in a wider account of the contradictions of Edwardian domestic life. This is a book not about pathology, but about patriarchy.
Men
Crippen, in Rubenhold’s hands, is neither monstrous nor especially compelling. He is instead the unremarkable product of a world that expected men to dominate and to be deferred to. The irony is that he did neither. His masculinity was insecure, he was short, his income irregular, his job somewhere between medicine and marketing, a dispenser of diluted remedies and of advertisements for his own dwindling respectability. He married women who were, by most social measures, above him: Charlotte Bell, an educated Irish Protestant with two careers behind her by the time they met; and Belle Elmore, a brash and competent music hall performer with a network of female friends, a public profile, and a talent for making things happen.
Crippen’s masculinity collapses under the weight of these women’s autonomy. Rubenhold quotes one of Belle’s friends describing his resentment: “He was always annoyed by how much time she spent on Guild business.” She ironised the whole set-up in private letters, how she paid the rent, kept them afloat, covered his inadequacies. Crippen, who had spent years theorising about women’s bodies, his medical articles on “hysterical deafness,” “the insanity of pregnancy,” and “paralysis of the sympathetic” are quoted at length, found himself confronted with women who defied his scripts. It is not hard to see how murder became, in the end, the reassertion of masculine control.
The manhunt and trial did not weaken this logic, but extended it. Rubenhold is particularly good on the gendered cast of Edwardian criminal justice. The court, the press gallery, the police station, the morgue, all staffed and narrated by men. Women are evidence, not witnesses. Even Ethel Le Neve, herself on trial, is spoken for, by the barristers who defend her, the journalists who reconstruct her “life story,” the experts who debate her “morals.” Crippen’s story “could not exist,” Rubenhold writes, “without the props provided by male authority.”
Stage
The music hall, where Belle made her name and found her voice, is at once a refuge and a trap. It offered women an income, a public persona, and, for a few, fame. But it also demanded performance, in every sense. Belle styled herself as “Belle Elmore,” reinventing her German-Polish birth name, Kunigunde Mackamotzki, for an English stage. She climbed slowly, through charity recitals, touring companies, part-time teaching, and, eventually, the Guild. Rubenhold’s treatment of the Guild is revealing. This was no simple charity: it was a proto-union, a mutual aid network of women determined to protect their own. They raised funds, found employment for struggling acts, and ensured funerals were paid for when needed. The Guild “brought solidarity and security into a world of contingency,” Rubenhold writes.
Yet the music hall also imposed its own codes. Women were to be glamorous, available, eternally entertaining. Rubenhold describes the Guild’s efforts to promote “respectability” as both a survival strategy and an ideological submission. It is the respectability of performance itself that is at stake. Belle had to perform both on stage and off: as a wife, as a professional, as a “lady.” Her real crime, in the eyes of many, seems to have been that she refused to hide the messiness of life. When a fellow music hall acquaintance visits her flat and finds “a heterogeneous mass” of false curls, dirty plates, and collar stays, she recoils in horror. Belle had failed to play her part.
Fame
In Rubenhold’s telling, the Crippen case anticipates our current fixation with true crime, celebrity culture, and the grotesque theatre of justice. Belle became famous not for her talent but for her death. Ethel Le Neve became a celebrity by proximity, her silhouette circulated in the press with all the ambiguity of the new photographic technologies, blurry, half-erased, a cipher for fear and desire. Rubenhold notes that “Ethel’s eyes haunted the public,” even when the rest of her was indistinct.
What we see here is the early formation of what would become the influencer economy. Belle cultivated her brand, curated a stage name, managed relationships. Ethel’s fame was less chosen, but equally produced by reporters, by courts, by public appetite. Rubenhold does not press the analogy too far, but one hears the echo of today’s true crime podcasts and Instagram tributes, where women’s suffering is content, and men remain the central actors, however incompetently played. Crippen’s name, after all, still sells books.
Ghosts
The most chilling lines in Rubenhold’s book are not about Crippen’s crime, but about the world that made it intelligible. “Respectability,” she writes, “was a system of performances designed to preserve masculine dominance.” It demanded submission from women and silence from men. But when those performances collapsed, the consequences were catastrophic. Belle was killed for refusing to stay in role. Ethel survived by learning hers to perfection.
We are left not with a gothic tale of murder and mutilation, but something more banal, and more damning: a society in which women’s voices were muffled, distorted, and in Belle’s case, finally extinguished. The cellar at Hilldrop Crescent is only the physical end of that process.
Afterlife
If Belle’s story ended in the cellar, Ethel’s lingered in the courtroom, the newspaper columns, the theatre of public opinion, and eventually, in the archive. Rubenhold reconstructs her life with a forensic empathy, recognising her not as the femme fatale of the press but as something altogether more familiar: a young woman trained from childhood to be decorative, deferential, and, if necessary, self-sacrificing. “Everything about Ethel had been carefully curated,” Rubenhold notes. Her father had gentrified the family name from Neave to Le Neve. She learned shorthand, took elocution lessons, dressed in the most flattering styles. Her wages as a typist were respectable enough, but her aspirations were aspirational. She read novels, taught herself French, and clipped out advertisements for Paris hats.
It is difficult to overstate how claustrophobic such a life was. Rubenhold is alert to the way in which femininity itself was constructed as pathology. Ethel’s refinement is always under suspicion. Her femininity, once Crippen is in the dock, becomes forensic evidence: her underwear is examined, her corsets analysed, her letters read aloud in court for traces of seduction. “I do so love you,” she wrote, “and want you near me always.” The judge called her “hysterical.” One reporter described her as “cold,” another as “abnormally passionate.” Rubenhold tracks this discursive trap: too much affect and she was manipulative, too little and she was complicit. The idea that she might have been frightened, confused, or simply in love was not one the Edwardian press was equipped to entertain.
Her body, like Belle’s, was made to stand for something. Where Belle’s remains were dissected to secure a conviction, Ethel’s figure was parsed to answer a different question: what kind of woman absconds with a man suspected of murder? The answer, from judge to journalist, was always the same—not a good one. Her sexual desire, however veiled, was the crime that would not be forgiven. “She must have known,” insisted a columnist in John Bull, “that no woman of virtue would run off dressed in a boy’s coat to Quebec with a married man.”
After her acquittal, secured in large part by her youth and femininity, Ethel vanished for a time. She reappeared in court three years later to sue a newspaper for libel, having been falsely accused of engaging in sex work. Rubenhold reads this not as vindication but as continuity. Ethel, she writes, was “never allowed to own her sexuality, only to defend herself against the stories others told about it.” She lived quietly for decades under her married name, raised two children, and died at 84, her story half-forgotten, reduced to a footnote in the life of a murderer.
And yet, as Rubenhold notes, the afterlife of such women is never quite theirs to command. Ethel was periodically resurrected by popular culture: in films, television dramas, tabloid retrospectives. She was recast in each generation’s image: a vamp, a victim, a dupe, a proto-feminist. In the 1950s, a novelist wrote a fictionalised account of her life. In the 1960s, Holloway Prison’s archives were combed for new insights. In the 2000s, DNA testing prompted a spate of revisionist theories that Crippen had been innocent all along, and that Ethel had perhaps helped dispose of the body. Rubenhold dismisses these with some scorn, noting that they rest on “the modern appetite for scandal disguised as scepticism.”
What’s striking is how Ethel’s fate mirrors the reputational precarity still faced by women who find themselves attached to scandal. Her image was a commodity, her name a search term before such things existed. She was, in effect, a prototype for the reality TV contestant, the viral girlfriend, the woman caught mid-sob in a thumbnail. And like them, she was expected to perform her trauma for a public eager to watch but reluctant to forgive. That she refused—refused interviews, refused book deals, refused even to attend the exhumation of her former lover’s remains—is perhaps the most radical thing she did.
In a world increasingly driven by the performance of self, her silence reads as resistance. But it is also, Rubenhold implies, an indictment: a reminder that the only way out of the story, for women like Ethel, was to disappear.
Labour
Rubenhold offers, for the most part, a recuperative psychology: an empathetic reconstruction of Belle and Ethel as women navigating the contradictions of femininity in Edwardian Britain. But at times this slips toward a kind of liberal humanism, in which individual resilience is allowed to stand in for structural transformation. Belle is shown to be smart, sociable, public-spirited; Ethel is quiet, self-stylised, aspirational. Yet the question of why these qualities mattered—how they were made legible or illegible under capitalism—is left largely unexamined. What mattered most, it seems, was not that Belle or Ethel were admirable women, but that their lives were organised around the circulation of value. Belle performed femininity not just to maintain respectability, but to secure work in a sector where charm, beauty and discretion were the wage. Ethel’s refinement was not simply personal taste, but a means of signalling class affiliation in a world of downward mobility and precarious employment.
Rubenhold provides useful glimpses of this economic architecture. Most music hall women earned very little, less than £1 a week, unless they were stars. Belle was thought to earn “between £3 and £4 per week,” although some placed her income higher, in the “twenties”: enough for modest jewellery and fashion, but far from luxury. Her labour—concerts, rehearsals, appearances, endless social cultivation—was both economic and aesthetic. She did not just work; she presented. The Guild itself, often cast as a philanthropic venture, was in practice a stopgap form of mutual aid in a hostile market. It distributed food, clothing and fuel, and found employment for abandoned or widowed performers. In 1908 alone, it helped over 300 women and their dependants, raising more than £400—a kind of shadow welfare system, organised by women for women, in the absence of any state infrastructure.
The music hall, in this light, was not only a space of aspiration or performance, but a laboratory of commodified femininity. The Guild operated within that logic. Women helped other women survive, yes, but always within the limits of what the market would bear. There was no strike, no demand for structural change, only a defence of “respectable” work within an already exploitative economy. Belle’s stage persona, Ethel’s shorthand training, the domestic polish expected of both, these weren’t just the trappings of womanhood, but the skills required for survival in a feminised labour market structured by risk, affect, and appearance.
It’s not unlike today’s economy of influencers and freelancers, where the self is both product and currency, and survival depends as much on self-branding as skill.
Rubenhold gives us women caught in the web of gender; a more radical reading might ask what class spun it.
Plot
I always find it difficult to say I enjoyed a book about murder. The subject resists it. But The Story of a Murder is a fascinating read, deeply researched, sharply argued, and quietly devastating. In many ways, it is a companion to Rubenhold’s earlier work on the victims of Jack the Ripper. There, as here, she refuses the familiar gravity of the killer’s charisma, and insists instead on the interiority, agency, and contradictions of the women who usually appear only in the periphery. She replaces pathology with structure, spectacle with condition. The focus is not the man who murdered, but the women he lived among, women who navigated the impossible demands of their time: to be visible but not vulgar, independent but not intimidating, desirable but not desiring.
What if, Rubenhold seems to ask, we read the story the other way round? What if Crippen was the footnote, and the real drama lay in the entangled lives of two women shaped and misshaped by the Edwardian compact between gender and class? What if the crime was not only what Crippen did, but what society demanded of the women around him?
The past, like the music hall stage Belle once danced upon, is crowded with exits and entrances. The audience may remember the villain, but it is the women who carry the plot.
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