Trials of Passion

May 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.).

May 15, 2015
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 Biere 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.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from May 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 Biere, 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

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2015
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. Appignanesi brings a wealth of psychiatric insight and historical detail to this question. She uses three celebrated cases to illuminate the tensions between the law and science. These cases also demonstrate, as her epigraph from Julian Barnes states that, every love story is a potential grief story. The first case involves chocolate. In 1870, the rejected lover of a Brighton, England, doctor tried to cover up her poisoning attempt of the doctor's wife by distributing poisoned chocolates through the entire town. The second case involves stalking and shooting, again by a rejected lover, a concert singer, in Paris in 1880. Surprisingly, since this book focuses so much on women and madness, the third case stars a male murderer: Henry Kendall Thall, who murdered Stanford White in Madison Square Garden in 1906. The text is a bit repetitive at times but still of interest to true-crime devotees.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)