Trials of Passion - Crimes Committed in the Name of Love and Madness - Hardcover

Strange and fascinating.

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.

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.

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

A keen, dense examination of crimes of passion. 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.

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

Colorful, and cerebral. 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.

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

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.

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, author of The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture

A journey into the heart of dark passions and the crimes they impel, and their trial by daylight and doctors. 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 storytelling 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.