Daedalus

Fabulous piece, Raine.

A well deserved win, Raine. The voice is wonderful and the whole piece captivating.

Well done, Raine!

Okeydoke we got there in the end, it looks like. Thank you all for your stories (and screenplay) – I enjoyed reading them all. However one winner it has always been and one winner it will be tonight and that winner, for the enchanting voice, the sinister — yet strangely beautiful — turns of phrase, and the macabre subtlety of it all, from the tit…[Read more]

Hi everyone, I’ve read the stories in the Feb/Mar/Apr comp – thank you all for those. Now, I’m not totally clear if people are planning to send me their favourites for me to add up, or if I’m to do it the usual way (where deciding a winner is solely up to me), so I will leave it for a while – til later this afternoon, maybe – and then I’ll go with…[Read more]

Agreed, it’s a little ironic that Rubenhold seems to have done the exact thing she was hoping to undo. Sigh. It actually serves as quite an interesting example of unreliable narrators and self awareness, and our ability to retrain our own ingrained biases. I read a lot of stuff about ‘decolonising’ in ref to both the colonised and the colonisers,…[Read more]

Mutated the quote, I know. Sorry. In my defence it didn’t say the quote had to be exact. Plus, I know ‘ghosting’ isn’t about ghosts, but I like ghosts, and am too old to write about ‘ghosting’! 😀

Aconite and Forget-me-not.
(347 words)

To you who I’ve haunted, will you listen? I have whispered stories in your ear and did you hear them? They were both your stories and mine, your sins and yes, mine too, and when I paid for both of us, you thought yourself free. So I came, did I not, to remind you. I have been the footfalls behind you in t…[Read more]

Interesting point there, Raine, about reinforcing society’s assumptions because, obviously, Rubenhold was trying to do exactly the opposite. Bit of a misfire, that.

Agreed, John, that it’s an appalling attitude. The book sets out to do a job that was well worth doing. I just wish she’d done it in a less fanatical and dishonest way.

Before I forget to say it “Great blog, Richard”.

The same sort of appalling victim-blaming appears to have been prevalent in the much more recent Yorkshire Ripper enquiry. According to a recent documentary, the police assumed the ripper, Sutcliffe, was punishing prostitutes when, in fact, he was preying on their vulnerability. At one point they failed to “credit” a victim to him because she…[Read more]

Could not agree with you more on that, @Raine. There is no shame in surviving. Doing what you have to do in a system stacked against you.

Interesting, Richard. I’d heard some of the reviews/hype/chat about the book, and liked the idea of presenting the women as three dimensional people – something other than just another dead whore. By the the sounds of it though, Rubenhold equates the women sleeping alone with them being absolved of any contributing blame for what happened to them,…[Read more]

This is so interesting, Richard. I don’t have any special knowledge about the Ripper case but it does sound like this is historical writing being bent to fit at agenda. I recently met with an Australian writer, Clare Wright, who won a major prize down here (the Stella Prize) for her book on women at the Eureka Stockade – an historical event that…[Read more]

I did see the programme, Squidge, and yes, it was very interesting. I had heard of this man, Aaron Kosminski, before – he is also the suspect named in the recent DNA testing controversy – and though many people are not convinced, I am at least convinced that the Ripper (whoever he was) was an ordinary, local man, a face in the crowd with int…[Read more]

Read this Richard as I’d watched the recent programme with the woman who is the lead in Silent Witness, an ex-prison governor with experience of serial killers and an ex-cold case copper, which looked at the Ripper story in light of modern techniques.

It was fascinating – a lot of the info I’d heard before, but what came clearly across is that…[Read more]