ABSTRACT
The book opens in the National Archive in London, where an Israeli author – based very closely on myself – is burrowing through nineteenth-century legal documents, trying to trace the stories of Selina Wadge and Ellen Harper, real, underclass English women, each of whom murdered her child, a disabled two-year-old and a newborn respectively. This is the beginning of Malice Aforethought, a research journey into the difficult realities of lower-class women-mothers in Victorian England that becomes an emotional and social expedition into the complex and less-discussed sides of motherhood in the nineteenth century and today. The author-narrator spends a year following Selina and Ellen in an attempt to discover details of their lives that may give her an in-depth understanding of the reasons for their terrible acts. Finding it hard to believe that they were fundamentally evil or insane, she empathetically investigates their stories, detecting the social pressures they were subjected to as women, as poor people and as mothers. Living and working in Israel and being a spouse and a mother of twin girls, it is difficult for her to make time to travel to archives in England. When she succeeds in getting there, usually during family trips, the research sessions are always tense and breathless, accompanied by guilt at having taken time for her own research and herself. However, the author-narrator’s extensive reading in archival documents – depositions, protocols of lawsuits, censuses, indexes, letters, newspapers – affords her only a limited and fragmented picture of the two women and their lives. In an attempt to draw a better and more concrete picture of Ellen’s and Selina’s lives, she and her family undertake a journey to geographical sites where they lived, and, in Selina’s case, died, in Somerset and Cornwall. She collects all the information she can by photographing streets, churches, cottages, courts and prisons, looking at graves in cemeteries and even interviewing people in local pubs. Occasionally she finds traces of Ellen and Selina, but frequently her search is fruitless and frustrating. To diminish feelings of loneliness and helplessness aroused by her historical and sociological quest, she invents Noa, an academic historian who becomes her (imagined) friend, her rival and her alter ego. As part of her academic career, Noa too is researching nineteenth-century mothers who committed infanticide. As opposed to the narrator, who feels guilty at stealing a few hours in the archives, Noa has spent several months of extended archival research in London, away from her husband and their small daughter. The two scholars – the narrator and Noa – ponder over who is truly responsible for the acts of infanticide, how the courts of the time ruled each case, and finally what befell Ellen and Selina following their respective verdicts. The book ventures into fundamental questions about knowledge, its construction and status. Translating this approach into narrative structure, it draws out firsthand personal experience in the attempt to understand the lives of historical
characters, also presenting comprehensive research to negotiate the vast differences in period, geography, culture and class. It explicitly cites legal theory, social history studies, extensive research on infanticide, the history and theory of motherhood, carefully deciphered legal documents, nineteenth-century newspaper articles, medical reports, census data, letters and more. Yet, in the face of the black holes left behind by 130 years of history, despite this scholarly knowledge base, the choice to fabricate significant parts of the two women’s tales is emphasised through the text. Deftly, yet openly, weaving storytelling and scholarship, this structure both undermines and critically questions the boundaries between fact and fiction as well as standard genre-based distinctions. A history drawing on literature, a creative literary work anchored in strictly documented microhistory, Malice Aforethought is both academic research and fiction simultaneously. Underlining the book’s hybrid view of what counts as ‘real’, a collection of intentionally grainy photographs is embedded in the text. These offer vague and somehow distorted visualisations of the physical and emotional surroundings of the journey and research. While detailed footnotes further round out the historical, theoretical underpinnings of the search, they oppose the grain of academic codes and customs (bolded letters designate where there is additional information in the endnotes), affording readers a ‘behind the scenes’ view of the research process.
