Literary representations of female murderers can reveal much about gender anxieties in eighteenth-century England. Kirsten Saxton has assembled a fascinating collection of lurid accounts of wives killing their husbands, mistresses their servants or lovers, and maids their employers between 1680 and 1760. The boundaries blur between fact and fiction as similar narratives of feminine homicide emerge in novels, criminal biographies, and essays.

Deadly Plots progresses in roughly chronological fashion, first looking at Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley’s fictional murderesses, followed by a chapter on four actual female killers, selected to show a cross section of the variety of such feminine deviance that engaged popular attention. Among these four women is the fascinating figure of Mary Blandy, who was convicted of poisoning her father and hanged in 1752. Saxton also discusses a mistress who fatally beat her maid, a charwoman who stabbed three women while robbing them, and a tradesman’s wife who decapitated her husband. The fourth chapter then returns to fiction by looking at murderesses in Henry Fielding and Daniel Defoe’s novels. Mary Blandy and Henry Fielding both reappear in the following chapter.

Saxton’s own narrative takes on a greater level of complexity in this fifth and penultimate chapter of the book. Fielding was both an acting magistrate and a popular novelist in early eighteenth-century London. Blandy, too, as a real-life murderess and author of Miss Mary Blandy’s Own Account of the Affair Between Her and Mr. Cranstoun (1752), is simultaneously an actor in and creator of a narrative of female murder. The two offer different interpretations of Blandy’s murder case, and each reveals the art involved in nonfiction. Elements of Fielding’s novel Amelia emerge in his legal treatise against Blandy. Blandy’s careful crafting of the events leading up to her patricide resonates with those of fictional murderesses who were perceived as victims rather than monsters. Fiction and fact, life and art are inextricably linked in this literary battle between the convict and the magistrate.

Deadly Plots as a whole exhibits such duality, simultaneously presenting both a literary criticism and a social history of eighteenth-century murderesses. Given Saxton’s background in English literature, it is unsurprising that it is most successful in the former. It is beautifully written. It begins and ends with a powerful quotation from Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace that compares the fascination with female murder to the “lurid but also furtive” scent of hothouse gardenias. There is a lyrical quality to Saxton’s prose. This can be seen, for example, in her celebration of the way in which Aphra Behn’s History of the Nun turned “stitchery and witchery on their heads, making the female art of needlework … the means of murder” (38).

Saxton also astutely avoids the tendency of some literary scholars to privilege post-1740s literature over its earlier counterparts, condemning the latter as plot driven and gendering it feminine. Instead, Aphra Behn is treated on the same plane as Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding. The earlier novels are not without their differences, but Deadly Plots considers them to have implicit feminist social commentary. The female protagonists in Behn’s The Fair Jilt (1688) and The History of the Nun (1689) and Delarivier Manley’s The Wife’s Resentment (1720) are presented as criticisms of contemporary legal protections for women. Their heroines begin as decent models of femininity who become murderesses after being thwarted by their male lovers and by the legal system more generally. The murder stories in Fielding’s Amelia (1751) and Defoe’s Roxana (1724), by contrast, “provide explicitly didactic visions of social control that criminalize female agency and attempt to demonize female criminality” (85). All, however, offer some condemnation of men’s failure to fulfill their masculine duties, and (some more subtly than others) apportion a measure of male responsibility to the creation of the female murderer.

As a historically sensitive work of literary criticism, the book is forced to walk the tightrope of interpreting symbols and messages within eighteenth-century print and placing it within its social and legal context. Saxton is thus faced with the unavoidable problem of having to choose either to be a twenty-first-century reader or to imagine the reactions of those of the eighteenth century. She has selected the former path, openly acknowledging that “I of course cannot read or think without the worldview that my cultural and historical placemat provides me” (3). Instead, the eighteenth-century stories are presented as both historical and current, interacting with modern audiences. Saxton has cleverly traced their reinvention or reinterpretation in the fiction and nonfiction of subsequent centuries.

Since Saxton’s training was in English literature, rather than history, Deadly Plots is understandably less rigorous in its command of recent historiography. The marked absence of any discussion of works from the last decade on domestic violence, criminal biography, and homicide in eighteenth-century Britain (e.g., Cassandra Watson, Poisoned Lives: English Poisoners and Their Victims [2004]; and Vannessa Macmahon, Murder in Shakespeare’s England [2004]) means that these issues lack a little of the depth they might have attained. The issue of domestic violence, in particular, deserved a more nuanced treatment. This was not an age in which husbands punished wives or employers their servants with impunity. Though Saxton demonstrates some consciousness of this fact, her misguided use of Burford and Shulaman’s statement that wife beating “continued to be ‘widely practiced and regarded as a husband’s right, underpinned by the Holy Writ’” slightly undermines the historical integrity of the book (72). In most ways, however, Saxton’s presentation of the eighteenth-century world in which her murderesses existed—in print or in the flesh—rings true. Kirsten Saxton has created a very valuable piece of scholarship for those interested in print accounts of female murderers in the long eighteenth century.