Author’s Reading with Rebecca Gowers

Author Reading with Rebecca Gowers:Muybridge’s 1878 San Francisco Panorama shows us a cityscape long since lost to time. But how ‘panoramic’ was it really? What does this picture hide? 150 years ago, these same streets witnessed both a disastrous marriage and the unstoppable love of two seductive orphans, a combination that would lead to stone cold M**der. Remarkably, Muybridge himself was the killer. And there would be no justice for his victim, an outcome with implications for the history of photography, and more. Author Rebecca Gowers will explain how she came to discover that the mysterious conman executed by Muybridge, with a bullet to the heart, was in fact a member of her own family. She will outline the challenge of gathering new evidence in the case, and discuss how, after a century and a half, it has at last been possible to reveal the truth of this desperate story.

Rebecca Gowers is the author of five books, fiction and non-fiction. Her work has been serialised on Radio 4, and she has twice been longlisted for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction). Her most recent title, The Scoundrel Harry Larkyns and his Pitiless Killing by the Photographer Eadweard Muybridge, was shortlisted for the 2020 Historical Writers’ Association Golden Crown award, and the following year she appeared as a talking head in the documentary Exposing Muybridge, directed by Marc Shaffer and featuring Gary Oldman. She is on the staff of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford, and is currently engaged in writing a new novel.

Praise for The Scoundrel Harry Larkyns:‘Gripping, cinematic, tragic and tender … A hugely enthralling story of a life richly lived… a contender for one of the best books of the year’ Irish Times‘…painstakingly researched account of a forgotten and troubled ne’er-do-well; it’s a story that is as eventful as it is tragic’ Guardian‘Strange, brilliant, quirky and illuminating… The fantastical twists and turns in Larkyns’s life are brilliantly, and coolly, recovered by the author’ Country Life

Admission includes exclusive 'after-hours' access to Kingston Museum's new San Francisco in Kingston: Muybridge and panoramas exhibition and a complimentary glass of wine or soft drink.

Host or Publisher Kingston Heritage Service