cover image Lost Love: A True Story of Passion, Murder, and Justice, New York 1869

Lost Love: A True Story of Passion, Murder, and Justice, New York 1869

George Cooper. Paragon House Publishers, $22.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-55778-626-5

Using letters and newspaper articles, retired law professor Cooper has woven an involving tale of a mid-l800s romance that ended in violence and scandal. Abby Sage was a shy, bookish teenager when she married Daniel McFarland, a seemingly cultivated man twice her age. Underneath the cosmopolitan veneer, however, was an abusive alcoholic. After 10 years of marriage, a particularly brutal episode caused Abby to leave her husband and, not much later, she began a romance with Albert Deane Richardson, a journalist who had gained fame during the Civil War. The jealous McFarland attacked Richardson on the street and finally shot his rival in his newspaper office. Abby married Richardson at his deathbed. Fueled by a sensationalist press, public attitudes turned against Abby; at his trial, McFarland's lawyer argued his era's version of family values and the killer was acquitted. Abby never remarried, devoting the rest of her life to her two children and a writing career. She provides the book's most eloquent testimony in an affidavit quoted by Cooper: ``I was on trial before a New York Court as much as Daniel McFarland, and for a crime more heinous and more bitterly punished in a woman than murder committed by a man.'' (Sept.)