THE WOMAN ON THE CIRCUIT

Sophie Lyons and the Work of Survival

Sophie Lyons was trained to steal as a child and spent decades moving through the crowded cities of the nineteenth century, surviving by skill, performance, and constant motion.

In The Woman on the Circuit, Alana Sanchez traces Lyons’ life across New York, Canada, and the wider urban crime circuit, not as spectacle, but as labour. Drawing on court records, newspaper reporting, and Lyons’ own writing, this book examines the systems that shaped her choices: women’s criminal networks, policing and courts, public morality, and the narrow paths available to women who lived outside respectability.

Refusing easy judgement or tidy redemption, this is a restrained, evidence-led account of survival at the margins — and of what happens when a woman tries to take control of her own story in a world determined to tell it for her.