ABSTRACT
L.T. Meade’s The Sorceress of The Strand traces the criminal activities and successes of the villainous Madame Sara, eternally hunted by the story’s narrator, Dixon Druce. A reflection of the late Victorian poison panic, Madame Sara is a trained medical professional and capable herbalist who creates a criminal but feminised green space. With the lens of critical plant studies, her body and plant bodies blur together in a feminine-ecological anathema that uses criminal acts to demand and take by force the agency that fin de siècle society withheld from both women and plants.
