Alice & Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis by Alexis Coe

Coe explores Southern society in the 1890's from the perspective of sensationalist coverage of the trial that followed Alice Mitchell's murder of her former fiancee Freda Ward.  The public and doctors of the day were incapable of understanding the same-sex attraction that compelled nineteen-year-old Alice to propose marriage to seventeen-year-old Freda and then drove Alice to desperation when Freda's family discovered the affair and forbade any future contact between the two.  Terms such as deviancy, perversion, and insanity appeared often during the trial. Coe delves into the limited roles and possibilities of girls and women during the Victorian era.  The author also compares the type of justice applied to genteel white women to the lynching of three black men. The narrative is enhanced with primary source materials, particularly the impassioned love letters between Alice and Freda.  This is a fascinating glimpse of social mores in a distant place and time.  Recommended.