In August 1893, a twenty-year-old woman in Croydon slashed her mother’s face with a knife twice in one day, then struck her with a poker through the parlour window. In court she said that if she had the chance, she would do it again. So what really went on between this mother and daughter?

Her name was Mary Ann O’Rourke. The records follow her from the Croydon police court to Lisson Grove, a cell in Holloway and an inebriate reformatory, with her photograph sent round the pubs so that no one would serve her. I trace her mother too, down a road you probably won’t expect, and the baby son Mary Ann wasn’t allowed to take to prison with her, all the way to a sinking cruiser in the North Sea.

This is her story, told through the records she left behind.