Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes by Emelyne Godfrey (review)

In his 1909 novel Ann Veronica, H. G. Wells depicts a date rape thwarted by female self-defense: “They began to wrestle fiercely. … Ann Veronica had been an ardent hockey player and had had a course of jiu-jitsu in the High School. Her defence ceased rapidly to be in any sense ladylike, and became vigorous and effective” (qtd. in Godfrey 94). Emelyne Godfrey contrasts this scuffle with the rape scene in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), where Tess “is portrayed as asleep when Alec rapes her” (95). The shift implied by this juxtaposition constitutes the subject of Godfrey’s book, a study of women’s self-defense in the face of violence—especially sexual violence—in turn-ofthe-century literature. The book is intended to show “that literature which discusses the dangers that women could encounter both inside the home and outside it also explores the means by which women could protect themselves” (156).

Godfrey describes the book as a “sister volume” to her earlier study, Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature (2011). The current volume consists of three parts and seven chapters, and focuses mainly on lesser-known works of fin-desiècle and pre-war fiction: Wells’s Ann Veronica, Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889), Elizabeth Robins’s The Convert (1907) and Where Are You Going To …? (1913), and Richard Marsh’s series in The Strand about lip-reading detective Judith Lee (1911–12). Other texts that receive attention, if not top billing, include Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus (1894), Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), Robins’s My Little Sister (1913), and a smattering of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.

While the readings of these texts are often interesting, the real strength of the book lies in Godfrey’s archival findings and her capacity for turning up odd and intriguing primary sources related to her subject. I was delighted to learn, for example, about Marcus Tindal’s “Self-Protection on a Cycle” (1901), which “advised male and female cyclists how to use their bicycles against attackers” (26). Godfrey also discusses the late 1870s fad for “dagger-fans” (ladies’ fans designed to look like daggers), and takes us on a fascinating digression to describe hatpin injuries in the late-Victorian period, including “accounts of customers accidentally poignarding each other in the scrum at the high-street bargain sales” and reports of a “serial pin pricker … on the loose” who, using hatpins, “liked to stab his victims, unaccompanied women” (81).

Godfrey finds her richest material, and that which works best for her argument, when she turns to suffragette self-defense training. She profiles Edith Garrud, a British ju-jitsu teacher who prepared militant suffragettes for police fray and who was “probably the first lady teacher to strenuously forge the link between Japanese martial arts for women and the female suffrage” (99), and includes a series of photographs from a 1910 issue of Sketch in which Garrud demonstrates how to “throw a policeman” (104). Having been manhandled by police in the early stages of their militant phase, members of the Women’s Social and Political Union sought training in “how to counter police aggression” using martial arts (99). Militant suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst advised her followers to learn ju-jitsu, and a group of twenty-five suffragettes formed “The Bodyguard” to protect Sylvia’s mother, suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst, from arrest.

If the book excels in bringing such fascinating material to light, unfortunately it fails to marshal its findings into a compelling overall argument. At the heart of the material gathered here, there is an important case to be made regarding changing conceptions of sexual assault. Dinah Mulock Craik wrote in 1858 that a woman could never be...