In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Narratives of Women and Murder in England, 1680-1760. Deadly Plots
  • Jane Kromm
Kirsten T. Saxton . Narratives of Women and Murder in England, 1680-1760. Deadly Plots. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. 151. $89.95.

From the time of Sarah Malcolm's arrest through her execution and its aftermath, tales of the laundress's exploits abounded. [End Page 65] These included outrageous and titillating acts, even seductions and engagements. Malcolm's buccaneering impulses seemed to be unstoppable, and were not thwarted by prison cell or tempered by feminine remorse. The subjects of Ms. Saxton's able study are the many eighteenth-century narratives that were spun around the figure of the female murderer. Minimizing genre boundaries, the study considers all relevant types of sources as mutually influential. These include nonfiction criminal writings, "amatory" novels by Behn (The Fair Jilt and The History of the Nun) and Manley (The Wife's Resentment), and two canonical novels, Defoe's Roxana, the Unfortunate Mistress, and Fielding's Amelia. The Epilogue briefly considers the female perpetrators in novels by women from the 1790s: Inchbald's Nature and Art, Wollstonecraft's Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, and Robinson's The Natural Daughter. Ms. Saxton's theoretical orientation combines a feminist approach to the early novel along with its relationship to legal texts, and argues for the presence of mixed novelistic strategies, especially circumstantiality and realist elements, alongside amatory extremes in all the works studied.

Conduct books and legal treatises promoted a standard model for woman's nature against which the female murderer figure was either an unwomanly monster or a travesty of excessive womanliness. Such books of course created exemplars in order to support larger arguments about maintaining social order, a standard that the increasingly popular writings about criminals threatened to erode. Crime writing proliferated from the 1670s through the early 1700s, but particularly in trial reports and the Newgate ordinaries' accounting of a criminal's last days—veritable "misconduct" books as Ms. Saxton aptly calls them. While ubiquitous tales of crime increased anxieties about social instability and upheaval, there was no correlative increase in actual crime. It was precisely the unsavoriness of writing that linked criminal accounts to the work of early novelists and women writers.

To understand how early narratives configured female murderers, Ms. Saxton turns to Behn and Manley, whose novels accentuate the circumstances and details of women's crimes, particularly the civic restrictions and legal gaps that withheld protections and due process from women. Such factors are the principal causes of crimes committed by women rather than the "prescriptive fantasies" of the conduct books. In this way, their novels bring a refreshing circumstantiality and a kind of situational ethics to the perception of crime and criminal responsibility. There is also a startling absurdity in the exploits of Behn's and Manley's protagonists, as they mimic rakish behavior (Behn's Miranda) or commit outrageous acts (Manley's Violenta).

Four actual cases are examined: Catherine Hayes decapitated her husband in 1726; Mary Blandy poisoned her father in 1752; the servant Sarah Malcolm killed three women in 1733, one a former employer; and Elizabeth Brownrigg tortured and killed a female apprentice in 1767. All four were hanged, and all four committed their crimes with male confederates who in each case were let off lightly (a suspicious feature). Contemporary accounts are consulted for each crime, but with so much material extant, it is impossible to include everything. For example, Blandy's own text of her situation is consulted (it gets a separate chapter along with Fielding's juridical exposition), but Malcolm's is not. Moreover, criminal biographies used "fictional conventions," making them potentially unreliable, and even contemporaries had misgivings about their veracity. Visual [End Page 66] representations of the four criminals are reproduced, and these range from vignettes to the new popular format, criminal portraiture. The images of Blandy are from James Granger, and they are three of the five known contemporary portrayals of her. The Malcolm print is from John Trusler (1800), and is not as subtle as Hogarth's original, which inspired eleven contemporary variants, some with striking circumstantial details. Both sets of "evidence," images and accounts, are canvassed, and...

pdf

Share