ABSTRACT
This chapter considers three novels of the 1790s whose visions of female criminals allows to gesture toward continuities as well as shifts in English fictional visions of female crime at the cusp of the nineteenth century: Elizabeth Inchbald's Nature and Art, Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, and Mary Robinson's The Natural Daughter. By the 1790s, the novel itself was no longer a new or marginal form but a recognizably dominant mode of cultural expression. Nature and Art, Maria, and The Natural Daughter all overtly challenge orthodox patriarchal formulations of women and crime. Like earlier fiction by women, Nature and Art, Maria, and The Natural Daughter use the female criminal character to reveal the ways in which female agency is rendered criminal by oppressive and sexist social and juridical systems. These novels locate criminal violence in the bodies of legitimate husbands and judges whose power over female bodies renders women victims rather than perpetrators of violent crime.
