"Miss Tennyson Jesse, who writes when she has a mind to, when she has something to say and no oftener, never says the same thing twice," the Times Literary Supplement observed in 1926. What she has to say about crime and punishment in her best-known novel, A Pin to See the Peepshow (1934), offers a meticulous analysis of the genesis of catastrophe and a resounding indictment of self-righteousness in the execution of justice. Widely respected as a journalist, novelist, playwright, and criminologist, Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse chose as the subject for this novel one of England's most controversial murder cases, the trial of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters for the murder of Mrs. Thompson's husband. Her thesis, equally applicable to the fiction and its source, is that women are judged by different standards than men and pay a greater penalty for their follies.

Jesse was also writing a social history of...