Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

Overview

A journey into the heart of dark passions and the crimes they impel. When passion is in the picture, what is criminal, what is sane, what is mad or simply bad? Through court and asylum records, letters and newspaper accounts, this book brings to life some sensational trials between 1870 and 1914, a period when the psychiatric professions were consolidating their hold on our understanding of what is human. Outside fiction, individual emotions and the inner life had rarely been publicly discussed: now, in an increasingly popular press and its courtroom reports, people avidly consumed accounts of transgressive sexuality, savage jealousy and forbidden desires. These stood revealed as aspects not only of those labelled mad, but potentially, of everyone. With great story-telling flair and a wealth of historical detail, Lisa Appignanesi teases out the vagaries of passion and the clashes between the law and the clinic as they stumble towards a (sometimes reviled) collaboration. Sexual etiquette and class roles, attitudes to love, madness and gender, notions of respectability and honor, insanity and lunacy, all are at play in that vital forum in which public opinion is shaped—the theater of the courtroom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781605988153
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	07/15/2015
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Lisa Appignanesi was born in Poland and grew up in France and Canada. A novelist and writer, she is Visiting Professor of Literature and the Medical Humanities at King's College London, Chair of the Freud Museum, and former President of PEN. She was awarded an OBE for services to Literature in 2013. She lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

05/18/2015
Crimes of passion have a long and fascinating history, and Appignanesi (Mad, Bad, Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to Present) is particularly adept at the colorful, and cerebral, examination of three such crimes committed between 1870 and 1914. First is England’s Christina Edmunds, whose obsession with Dr. Charles Beard leads her to try fatally poisoning Beard’s wife and others with chocolate creams. The acquittal in France of concert singer Marie Bière, who stalked and shot her lover, was a step forward for women, making it “permissible for women to... act violently... to protect or avenge their honor.” And millionaire Henry Kendall Thaw’s notorious 1906 revenge killing of American architect Stanford White, following White’s affair with Thaw’s wife, was front-page fodder. Leaving no stone unturned, Appignanesi details the actions of psychiatrists, courts, and the press amid allegations of “hysteria,” stalking, affairs, obsession, “love-madness” (nymphomania), and children born out of wedlock. The factual material—court transcripts, asylum records, lovers’ letters, and “hint and smear” news accounts—is vast and historically resonant. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Associates (U.K.). (July)

Publishers Weekly

Enthrallingly narrated, Appignanesi's book compels with its gruesome subject matter and delights with a wealth of bizarre detail.

The Daily Telegraph

Novelist,
feminist, cultural critic and historian Lisa Appignanesi is an intellectual.  Her cosmopolitan background, scholarly expertise, and narrative verve unite in this analysis of three sensational crimes of passion in England, France, and the United States, and the ways doctors and lawyers battled to explain and judge them in the courts. An exciting, enthralling and enlightening book.

Elaine Showalter

Appignanesi shows a country in the grip of profound cultural changes, many of them involving views of the proper place and behaviour of women; questions of honour and reputation and the ways they might properly be defended; and, most importantly, debates about how the passions might manifest themselves in everyday life. I suspect Trials of Passion will find a broad audience, and deservedly so.

Times Literary Supplement (reprinted in the Wall Street Journal)

A stupendous achievement, combining brilliant historical sleuthing with masterful storytelling. Appignanesi's book offers at once a canny cross-cultural analysis of the (mis-) uses of the insanity plea and an evocative account of how our forebears a hundred years ago made sense of the lethal havoc that could be wreaked by unassuaged jealousies and amorous obsessions. Trials of Passion transforms our understanding of the origins of ‘the sexual century’ — the one we've just left behind, but which continues to leave its marks on our present.

Dagmar Herzog

Appignanesi combines a historian's expertise with a novelist's eye for lurid detail.

Tatler

Trials refers here both to some celebrated criminal trials and to the trials faced by the western justice system in the late-nineteenth century up to WWI in trying to come to grips with what should be considered 'mad' or 'bad.' Appignananesi brings a wealth of psychiatric insight and historical detail to this question.

Booklist

Appignanesi is a fine storyteller, bringing the characters and times to life. This is a clear and fascinating introduction to the grey zone between criminal guilt and madness.

Jewish Chronicle

A rich and rewarding work, brimful of insight and wisdom.

The Literary Review

Trials of Passion mixes sex, scandal and psychiatry in a way as exciting as today's headlines and as rich as yesterday's archives.

Edmund White

Strange and fascinating.

The Observer (UK)

Trials of Passion is a wholly absorbing, obsessively interesting book. Lisa Appignanesi’s stories of women and men who murdered and maimed for love, obsession, and revenge are told in vivid detail. But through these tales she gives the reader more: a portrait of an age and its often-contradictory ideas about madness, social mores, and the female psyche, all of which were on trial with the defendants. Deft, learned, and compassionate, this is a book for anyone who cares about the curious doings of the human mind strained to its limits by affairs of the heart.

Siri Hustvedt

A convincing, enlightening narrative that skillfully blends scholarship with a seductive interest in what makes us human.

The Observer

Trials refers here both to some celebrated criminal trials and to the trials faced by the western justice system in the late-nineteenth century up to WWI in trying to come to grips with what should be considered 'mad' or 'bad.' Appignananesi brings a wealth of psychiatric insight and historical detail to this question.

Booklist

★ 05/15/2015
Is love a form of madness, and can it rise to the point of legal insanity? This question is important in judging "crimes of passion," and in the late 1800s, these queries gained importance as the profession of psychology gained credibility. Appignanesi (visiting professor, King's Coll. London; former president, English PEN; Mad, Bad and Sad) looks at historic trials in which the accused committed a crime of passion, and how the courts—and the media—viewed this defense. The author focuses on three cases: those of Christiana Edmunds, who poisoned her lover's wife and many others; Marie Bière, who murdered the father of her child when he spurned her; and Henry Thaw, the American millionaire who killed Stanford White over his affair with Evelyn Nesbit. In all three investigations, the author considers the way in which psychological theories warred in the courtroom and how gender and social norms—women being viewed as weak and hysterical and men as heroic defenders of the fairer sex—colored society's view of madness. The arguments raised by and in these trials of passion are still hotly debated. VERDICT An endlessly fascinating account of the history of insanity pleas that will find an audience with social history fans as well as enthusiasts of true crime.—Deirdre Bray Root, MidPointe Lib. Syst., OH

Library Journal

2015-04-21
A keen, dense examination of crimes of passion in the decades before World War I. Novelist Appignanesi (Sacred Ends, 2013, etc.), who chairs the Freud Museum, explores three narratives of violence, arguing that the subsequent scandalous trials reveal changing perspectives on women in terms of psychology, spirituality, and class. She notes how the era's perceptions of feminine virtue made transformative legal dramas inevitable: "If a woman was being tried for murder and there was no insanity plea," she writes, "then she could only be either innocent or a monster of depravity." The first obscure tales from Victorian-era England and Paris foreshadow the modern phenomena of tampering and stalking. In Brighton, Christiana Edmunds was charged with a boy's murder following a public panic over poisoned chocolates, which she'd distributed in a plot to win back a married lover, and was ultimately committed rather than executed: "This moral insanity was understood as a disease…and it predisposed the patient to commit criminal acts." A few years later, singer Marie Bière shot her caddish ex-boyfriend in public following the death of the daughter he'd rejected. Although he survived to testify against her, her attorneys' narrative of hysteria provoked by cruelty resulted in acquittal. Appignanesi views this in terms of French Republican virtue: "It now seem[ed] more permissible for women to act, and to act violently if need be, to protect or avenge their honor." The author focuses on the seamier aspects of the better-recalled Stanford White-Evelyn Nesbit scandal, emblematic of Gilded Age New York, noting that the teenage Nesbit had married White's eventual murderer, brutish millionaire Harry Thaw, after he'd raped and assaulted her: "Evelyn continued to be pulled apart by the two men, each fearing that the other might trump him in her favours and in revelations about illicit acts." Appignanesi patiently constructs a mosaic of law, psychology, and class strictures, producing more of a sweeping academic meditation than a true-crime narrative. Will satisfy readers attuned to the juncture of history, psychology, and feminism.

Kirkus Reviews