We Keep the Dead Close

A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

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Pub Date 03 Dec 2020 | Archive Date 03 Dec 2020

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Description

‘You have to remember, he reminded me, that Harvard is older than the U.S. government. You have to remember because Harvard doesn't let you forget.’

1969: the height of counterculture and the year universities would seek to curb the unruly spectacle of student protest; the winter that Harvard University would begin the tumultuous process of merging with Radcliffe, its all-female sister school; and the year that Jane Britton, an ambitious 23-year-old graduate student in Harvard's Anthropology Department and daughter of Radcliffe Vice President J. Boyd Britton, would be found bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment.

Forty years later, Becky Cooper, a curious undergrad, will hear the first whispers of the story. In the first telling the body was nameless. The story was this: a Harvard student had had an affair with her professor, and the professor had murdered her in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology because she'd threatened to talk about the affair. Though the rumour proves false, the story that unfolds, one that Cooper will follow for ten years, is even more complex: a tale of gender inequality in academia, a 'cowboy culture' among empowered male elites, the silencing effect of institutions, and our compulsion to rewrite the stories of female victims.

WE KEEP THE DEAD CLOSE is a memoir of mirrors, misogyny and murder. It is at once a rumination on the violence and oppression that rules our revered institutions, a ghost story reflecting one young woman's past onto another's present, and a love story for a girl who was lost to history.


‘You have to remember, he reminded me, that Harvard is older than the U.S. government. You have to remember because Harvard doesn't let you forget.’

1969: the height of counterculture and the year...


Advance Praise

‘Exhilarating and seductive. Cooper will keep you riveted’ Ariel Levy 

‘Exhilarating… Becky Cooper masterfully uncovers the story of Harvard undergrad Jane Britton’ Vogue

'Cooper is a stylish and fearless writer, relentlessly self interrogating.' Boston Globe

‘(A) gripping literary nonfiction deb u t USA Today

'Cooper's suspenseful, intensely intimate work casts a critical lens on institutional misogyny. Sure to appeal to  true crime readers, especially fans of Michelle McNamara' s I'll Be Gone in the Dark.’ Library Journal

‘Exhilarating and seductive. Cooper will keep you riveted’ Ariel Levy 

‘Exhilarating… Becky Cooper masterfully uncovers the story of Harvard undergrad Jane Britton’ Vogue

'Cooper is a stylish and...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9781785151989
PRICE £16.99 (GBP)
PAGES 352

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