Violent Women and Sensation Fiction

This new study explores the way that stories and images of 'explosive' femininity worked across generic and disciplinary boundaries during the Victorian era. Andrew Mangham explores the era's problematic criminalisation of female behaviour with reference to medical theories on women's psychology, reports of notorious criminal cases, like Constance Kent's and Madeline Smith's, and the popular fictions of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood and Wilkie Collins.