The Little Prisoner: A Memoir - Softcover

Jane Elliott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061561312 ISBN 13: 9780061561313

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2008

Synopsis

When Jane Elliott was four years old, the nightmare began. She became the helpless victim of a sociopath—bullied, dominated, and sexually abused by a man only fourteen years her senior: her stepfather. For nearly two decades she was held prisoner, both physically and emotionally. But at the age of twenty-one she escaped . . . and then she fought back.

The Little Prisoner is the shocking, astonishing, and ultimately uplifting true story of one woman's shattering twenty-year ordeal—and how she triumphed against an evil and violent human monster when honesty and bravery were her only weapons.

About this title

About the Author:

Jane Elliott is a pseudonym. The author first decided to tell her story to the police after taking inspiration from Dave Pelzer's powerful memoir A Child Called It and becoming convinced that she could no longer remain a silent victim of the stepfather who had kept her a virtual prisoner for so many years.

From Publishers Weekly:

The charts are full of stories of childhood abuse now, Elliott writes, and speculates that fans of childhood abuse literature want to be shocked at the start of the book, crying in the middle and exultant at the end. Her account (Jane Elliott is a pseudonym) adds little that is fresh to the genre beyond that her [s]eventeen years was an astonishingly long time to have been systematically abused. A good part of this true story of a four-year-old girl who fell into the power of a man for whom evil was a relentless daily activity is devoted to the shock—graphic detail of her stepfather's physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Some readers will feel for Elliott as she continues to be victimized by a thoroughly amoral lunatic head of an incredibly dysfunctional family; others may find that the explicit detail teeters perilously close to the pornography of violence and of sexual degradation. While Elliott's stepfather is eventually sentenced to 15 years, little exultancy follows until Elliott decides to tell her story and achieves British bestsellerdom. Elliott's account, written with Crofts, makes fascinating reading as one wonders, in page-turner fashion, whether anyone will stop this man from terrorizing his stepdaughter, her mother, her siblings and the entire neighborhood. The vagueness of time and place, however, raise disquieting questions about reality. (Aug.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0061561312
• ISBN 13: 9780061561313
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 267