SOURCE: Morris, Virginia. “Mary Elizabeth Braddon: The Most Despicable of her Sex.” In Double Jeopardy: Women Who Kill in Victorian Fiction, pp. 88-104. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.

In the following essay, Morris explains how detective fiction mirrored Victorian attitudes and conventions regarding crime, as writers struggled to move from a stance of empty moralizing to a deeper understanding of the social and psychological roots of criminal behavior, particularly among women.

The women who shoot, poison, stab, steal, and blackmail their way through the sensation novels of the 1800s changed the nature of crime and criminals in Victorian fiction. These women are more ambitiously independent and less sexually repressed than traditional heroines, and their criminality is pervasive, violent, and even bizarre. Like comparable characters in other Victorian literature, they reaffirm the nineteenth-century precept that female sexuality and criminality are inextricably intertwined. But they also introduce the revolutionary idea...