Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture Book

List of Illustrations     ix
Acknowledgements     x
Introduction     1
Explosive Materials: Legal, Medical, and Journalistic Profiles of the Violent Woman     7
The body in the kitchen     7
Young women and adolescents: 'The mad fury of that lovely being'     9
Maternal maniacs     23
Morbid influences     29
Female old age: Sick fancies     39
'The Terrible Chemistry of Nature': The Road Murder and Popular Fiction     49
'The fussy activity about the nightdress of a school girl'     49
Popular fictional representations     63
'A tragedy of blood and tears': Aurora Floyd     64
'Smooth as polished crystal': St. Martin's Eve     71
'Detective fever': The Moonstone     79
'Frail Erections': Exploiting Violent Women in the Work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon     87
Poking the embers: The hysterical violence of young women     87
Unmotherly glances and sickly sentimentality: Dangerous maternities     103
Uncultivated waste: Post-menopausal women     116
'Nest-Building Apes': Female Follies and Bourgeois Culture in the Novels of Mrs Henry Wood     126
A man of two wives/a man of two lives: Divided masculinity and domestic ideology in East Lynne(1862)     129
'Looking back': The mother's influence in Danesbury House (1860) and Mrs Halliburton's Troubles (1862)     137
'The matrimonial lottery': Choosing a good wife in Lady Adelaide's Oath (1867)     143
'Evil heritages': Superstition and morbid heredity in The Shadow of Ashlydyat (1864)     149
A moth in the upturned tumbler: The control and display of passion in Verner's Pride (1863)     158
Hidden Shadows: Dangerous Women and Obscure Diseases in the Novels of Wilkie Collins     169
'What could I do?': The Woman in White (1860)     172
'In a glass darkly': No Name (1862)     182
'The shadow of a woman': Armadale (1866)     196
Conclusion     209
Notes     212
Bibliography     233
Index     242