Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book outlines popular eighteenth-century narratives of female homicide within the contexts of contemporaneous discourses on criminality, murder, gender, and fiction. It examines explicitly literary representations of the murderess, concentrating on early fiction writers Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley. The book focuses on the cases of four convicted murderesses: Catherine Hayes, Mary Blandy, Sarah Malcolm, and Elizabeth Brownrigg. It also shows how Henry Fielding's portrayal of the murderess Miss Mathews uses tropic notions of female criminality and libertinism, yet formally and thematically evokes the tropes used by Behn, Manley, and Haywood to critique such limited visions. The book moves from Fielding's fictional foray into Blandy's case in Amelia to his theological-jurisprudential account. It looks at female-authored fictional versions of female crime that arise within and from the politically charged and ideologically volatile climate of the 1790s.