Christopher Hilliard quotes Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in the epilogue to this book, to the effect that, “We’ll-behaves women seldom make history.” Hilliard’s microhistory explores Edith Swan and Rose Gooding and the libels that plagued the beach town of Littlehampton, England in the early 1920s. The mystery is who is the misbehaving woman; to unravel it we have to know about lower class literacy, the claustrophobia of women’s early 20th century lives, and how the British legal system navigated neighbors’ daily grievances. For more than three years this neighborhood was tortured by hundreds of expletive-filled letters, and Hilliard thinks he has the answer. The books is a reminder of how many rich stories have yet to be told.