The Sinners All Bow
Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne
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Narrated by:
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Kate Winkler Dawson
About this listen
Acclaimed journalist, podcaster, and true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson tells the true story of the scandalous murder investigation that became the inspiration for both Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and the first true-crime book published in America.
On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead in a quiet farmyard in a small New England town. When her troubled past and a secret correspondence with charismatic Methodist minister Reverend Ephraim Avery was uncovered, more questions emerged. Was Sarah’s death a suicide...or something much darker? Determined to uncover the real story, Victorian writer Catharine Read Arnold Williams threw herself into the investigation as the trial was unfolding and wrote what many claim to be the first American true-crime narrative, Fall River. The murder divided the country and inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter—but the reverend was not convicted, and questions linger to this day about what really led to Sarah Cornell’s death. Until now.
In The Sinners All Bow, acclaimed true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson travels back in time to nineteenth-century small-town America, emboldened to finish the work Williams started nearly two centuries before. Using modern investigative advancements—including “forensic knot analysis” and criminal profiling (which was invented fifty-five years later with Jack the Ripper)—Dawson fills in the gaps of Williams’s research to find the truth and bring justice to an unsettling mystery that speaks to our past as well as our present, anchored by three women who subverted the script they were given.
©2025 Kate Winkler Dawson (P)2025 Penguin AudioCritic Reviews
“Breakneck pacing, a novelist’s gift for scene-setting, and an edifying analysis of the overlap between the Cornell case and Hawthorne’s novel make this a home run. Readers will be rapt.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A fascinating approach to the story of Sarah Cornell, the woman whose death is said to have inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne to create Hester Prynne in his 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter. . . . Required reading for true-crime aficionados and those fascinated by puritanical New England.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Who killed Hester Prynne? In this haunting true crime investigation, Kate Winkler Dawson pursues justice for the real woman behind Hawthorne's heroine, Sarah Maria Cornell, whose mysterious death was initially ruled a suicide. Applying modern forensic techniques and joining forces with her 19th century counterpart, Catharine Williams, who wrote what is likely the first American true crime narrative, Dawson takes the reader on an intrepid and utterly gripping journey of discovery. Written in shimmering transportive detail, The Sinners All Bow is an exceptional work of historical reportage that resonates all too strikingly today.”—Abbott Kahler, New York Times bestselling author of Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II