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Reviewed by:
  • Reading for the Law: British Literary History and Gender Advocacy by Christine L. Krueger, and: Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in England, 1837–1925 by Cathrine O. Frank
  • Melissa J. Ganz (bio)
Reading for the Law: British Literary History and Gender Advocacy, by Christine L. Krueger; pp. xi + 301. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, $39.50.
Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in England, 1837–1925, by Cathrine O. Frank; pp. 250. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010, £60.00, $114.95.

In the past fifteen years, the study of law and literature has taken an historical turn, and Victorian culture has proved to be a rich site for analysis. Moving beyond accounts that posit either necessary alignments or oppositions between legal and literary discourses, critics have examined the ways in which imaginative writers responded to and anticipated developments in areas such as trial procedure, criminal justice, and intellectual property. Christine L. Krueger’s and Cathrine O. Frank’s engaging books offer welcome contributions to this interdisciplinary field. Exploring topics as varied as [End Page 567] witchcraft trials, lunacy hearings, and charitable trusts, the studies shed new light on nineteenth-century legal culture, while probing the relationship between law and narrative, reason and emotion, empiricism and imagination.

Legal scholars tend to emphasize timeless differences between law and literature, and between rule-based and narrative-based forms of advocacy. Law emerges, in these accounts, as “an authoritarian, rule-bound, patriarchal disciplinary discourse in need of the antidote of multivoiced, subjective, and oppositional literary discourse” (Krueger 2). In her wide-ranging and impressive study of nineteenth-century gender advocacy, Krueger offers a “sympathetic critique” of such claims for literature’s “emancipatory features” (98), while challenging the view that narrative is an “intrinsically efficacious antidote to … positivist rules of legal reasoning” (235). Replacing an ahistorical opposition between law and literature with a “history of their interdependency, and their embeddedness in print culture,” Krueger argues that “a multidisciplinary ‘historical narrative jurisprudence’ strengthens narrative legal theorists’ claims for the transformative powers of stories” (2). Her analysis of women’s engagements with the law in nineteenth-century Britain reveals the uses of literary history for feminist as well as other “outsider jurisprudence” (3).

Krueger divides her study into four parts. The first part reads Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lois the Witch (1859) in the context of a long history of witchcraft prosecution. Deftly surveying changing views of these proceedings from Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) and King James I’s Daemonologie in Forme of a Dialogue (1597) to treatises by Francis Hutchinson, Walter Scott, and William Godwin, Krueger argues that Gaskell’s novella exemplifies realism’s complex response to the legacy of witchcraft. Rather than theorize the legal system as a universal tool of patriarchal oppression, the text emphasizes the material and political conditions that gave rise to prosecution in seventeenth-century Salem. Gaskell also acknowledges women’s own role in the trials, even as she “posits a standard of rationality and realist historical narrative as defenses against legalized misogyny” (5).

Part 2 turns to literary and legal stories of mental competence, focusing on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (1863), and mid-century narratives by alleged lunatics. In different ways, all of these texts reveal the failure of narrative advocacy in a legal system that ties agency to property ownership. Part 3 considers legal and literary histories of testimony, focusing on novels by Gaskell, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, and George Eliot, as well as depositions in indecent assault cases from the 1840s and 1850s. The novels reject the law’s authority to credit women’s testimony, but in the process, they silence female witnesses. The depositions show that sentimental literary conventions are unreliable not only for women but also for homosexual men. Reade’s Griffith Gaunt (1866), by contrast, presents women as competent legal speakers, developing a “powerful popular fantasy of pro se representation.” Catherine Gaunt’s successful defense from a charge of murder suggests a view of “the criminal trial as a discursive site allowing for a uniquely unmediated, potent, and convincing form of self-representation” (189). For...

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