BOOK REVIEW: Judith Knelman.TWISTING IN THE WIND: THE MURDERESS AND THE ENGLISH PRESS. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.

Abstract

This historical study is the first full-length scholarly work that focuses on English women murderers in the nineteenth century. The serious, as opposed to sensational, examination of women and ordinary crime (that is, not criminal offenses, such as prostitution and witchcraft, normally perceived as "female" offenses) has only begun. Virginia Woolf's 1929 lament that women are all but absent from history books continues to hold true in criminology and legal history. Knelman's book joins a very short list headed by John Beattie's two contributions ("The Criminality of Women in Eighteenth Century England" [1982] and Crime and the Courts in England: 1660-1800 [1986]), Lucia Zedner's Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England (1991), and Malcolm Feeley and Deborah Little's "The Vanishing Female: The Decline of Women in the Criminal Process, 1687-1912" (1991). These works recognize the importance of re(dis)covering women's criminal history. Although most recorded murders have been committed by men, there is a significantly higher participation [End Page 698] rate for women in murders than in other ordinary crimes. To ignore these women, therefore, is to ignore an important part of legal, social, and cultural history.