About this episode
It’s Easter Sunday, 1955. Outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead, a young racing driver lies face down on the pavement. Standing over him with a gun is a petite platinum blonde, Ruth Ellis. She’s 28, a single mother of two, and she runs a nightclub in Knightsbridge. Three months later, she is hanged. Ruth Ellis was the last woman executed in Britain.
In A Fatal Love, her fifth novel, British writer Louisa Treger tells the story behind the headlines. A story of class, misogyny and abuse, and a justice system that failed a woman who was ahead of her time.
In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, Louisa talks about why Ruth’s real story captivated her. The trailblazer who became London’s youngest nightclub manager and raised two children on her own. We get into the postwar expectations placed on women, and why Louisa invented Kitty Carrington, a trainee lawyer, to show how the system worked against women, regardless of class.
Louisa has been on the show before, talking about The Paris Muse, her novel about Dora Maar.
The audiobook is narrated by Laura Enston, Ruth Ellis’s granddaughter. Louisa is now working on a novel about Gala Dalí.
This episode is spoiler free, so you can listen even if you haven’t read the book.