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Who killed Jane Britton in 1969?

5 December 2020

9:00 AM

5 December 2020

9:00 AM

We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and Half a Century of Silence Becky Cooper

Heinemann, pp.512, 18.99

The problem with telling stories about Harvard is that Harvard, if it teaches anything these days, teaches distrust of stories. So, for example, two thirds of the way through Becky Cooper’s long, ambitious book about the murder of a Harvard graduate student, the author explains that ‘we’ — those attempting to fashion a narrative about the gruesome fate of a 23-year-old woman bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge apartment in the late 1960s — ‘had unconsciously been perpetuating a story whose moral derived from the very patriarchal system we thought we were surmounting by telling the story in the first...

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