A powerful retelling of the Lizzie Borden murders

“Lizzie Borden took an axe,
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
 She gave her father forty-one” 

When See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt arrived I was immediately drawn to the book as it is the retelling of the infamous, or possibly famous, killing of a husband and wife, Andrew and Abbey Borden by their daughter, Lizzie.

The above rhyme was one my mother would say, although she would never tell me what it was about. I actually thought it was just a nonsense rhyme, until years later I read about the actual murder in Fall River, Massachusetts on a steamy, hot summer day in 1892.

Sarah Schmidt, in this her first novel, has managed to lyrically weave such an intensity of both horror and mundane reality into the pages, that the book becomes an utterly mesmerising read.

Narrated from the point of view of Lizzie herself, her older sister Emma, Bridget the maid and Benjamin, a petty criminal; the story is both poignant and painful. Lizzie, cloistered inside an uncomfortably hot house with her miserly father and stepmother is a prisoner of her own thoughts. Sarah Schmidt manages to imply through her skilful penmanship that Lizzie is perhaps mentally unbalanced, and being privy to her inner life, the reader would agree.

The descriptive prose, the sense of inertia and time standing still permeates the ageing house. Bridget the maid is busy serving up what can only be described as completely unsafe to consume mutton broth (it has been reheated over several days to keep within the tight household budget Andrew Borden unnecessarily imposes upon his household). Bridget cleans and keeps order, but can sense the unease and tension in the house, even though it is masked in gentility. To escape the tension, and their father’s pecuniary restraints, Emma is away visiting a friend.

Bridget the maid, and Mr and Mrs Borden have a bout of food poisoning and vomit everywhere. One can only imagine nineteenth-century cleaning equipment and the heat in the closed windowed house.

We are introduced to two more characters, the first Mrs Borden’s brother John, and his protégée Benjamin – although Benjamin remains a shadowy figure throughout, and is not seen by the other characters. Lizzie escapes the nausea as she has only been eating pears from the tree outside, near the barn where her pet pigeons live – however, Mr Borden hates the pigeons and Lizzie is in for a painful shock when she enters the barn on the morning of that fateful day in 1892.

I will not say more about the plot, as the characters themselves speak eloquently enough in their own narratives. The reader can breathe from the pages the imposed sense of forced duty to family members and the expectation of others, and of cruelty, selfishness and manipulation to get your own way. 

The voices in this book are excruciatingly painful to read at times, for example, Bridget the maid having her only chance of escape stolen from her when Mrs Borden steals her saved wages to stop her from leaving. There is such an intense atmosphere of obligation and stifled desires and desperation that it is obvious the situation can only implode, and of course, it does.

There is a saying, “less is more” and in this case, it is what is not written, and at times only implied that makes this book so absolutely spellbinding. The reader looking for clear motives and timelines will be disappointed, as instead they are fully immersed and dunked under the world of the Bordens.

It is riveting reading. I could smell the blood and vomit, feel the panic and tension and see clearly the closed off airless rooms where a family perilously pantomime the game of happy families. See What I Have Done is an outstanding work of fiction inspired by a century-old crime. It is a book I will not forget in a hurry and it is also one I can wholeheartedly recommend to readers of the psychological crime genre. Unforgettable!

See What I have Done by Sarah Schmidt (published by Hachette Australia) is available now from Dymocks. Click here to learn more.