CLOSET DRAMA

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Unknown, UCLA Department of Special Collections, Published in the United States as "The Summit House Mystery" (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1905), Lily Dougall’s story appears to mix the Redpath case with the famous Lizzie Borden double-murder case of 1892 in Massachusetts

Amy Redpath, Ada’s daughter and Clifford’s sister, a playwright and poet, wrote plays that belong to a genre known as “closet drama”: they were performed privately or perhaps never performed at all. According to present-day family members, the Redpath family never spoke publicly about the tragedy; so, like a closet drama, their story was never recounted in public. Amy Redpath left no written trace of the deaths of her brother and mother. In a letter Amy wrote to her sister-in-law Alice two months after the tragedy, she refers to the unpleasant business of destroying letters. Did these concern the deaths of Ada and Clifford?

The richest textual sources of family reaction to the event are the letters of Grace Wood Redpath, Clifford’s aunt and the widow of Peter Redpath, Clifford’s uncle. Grace was living in England in 1901. The letters provide a detailed, emotional response to the family’s loss, as Grace reached out to her Montreal-based nieces and nephews.

But three years after the event, Amy and Clifford’s cousin, Lily Dougall, wrote a particularly compelling “fictional” account of the Redpath tragedy. Published in the United States as The Summit House Mystery, the story appears to mix the Redpath case with the famous Lizzie Borden double-murder case of 1892 in Massachusetts.

The evidence in this section suggests that the case was kept quiet, like a closet drama. If the tragedy was a murder-suicide, why is the number of suicides in Montreal for June 1901 recorded as “zero”?

Books

Letters

Multimedia

Photographs, Paintings or Drawings