Introduction: Twice Guilty: The Double Jeopardy of Women Who Kill -- The Worst of Women: Sisters in Crime -- Women and Victorian Law: A Curious Chivalry -- Charles Dickens: The Fiercest Impulses -- George Eliot: My Heart Said, "Die!" -- Mary Elizabeth Braddon: The Most Despicable of Her Sex -- Wilkie Collins: No Deliverance but in Death -- Thomas Hardy: A Desperate Remedy -- Arthur Conan Doyle: Vengeance Is Hers
Murder fascinates readers, and when a woman murders, that fascination is compounded. The paradox of mother, lover, or wife as killer fills us with shock. A woman's violence is unexpected, unacceptable. Yet killing an abusive man can make her a cultural heroine. In Double Jeopardy, Virginia Morris examines the complex roots of contemporary attitudes toward women who kill by providing a new perspective on violent women in Victorian literature. British novelists from Dickens to Hardy, in their characterizations, contradicted the traditional Western assumption that women criminals were ""unnatural
