But the evidence so undeniably revealed deliberate and merciless premeditation that the only defense attempted by her counsel was madness and the only alternative left to a righteous jury was a verdict which condemned the woman to death."
Bonds between brothers and sisters are among the longest lasting and most emotionally significant of human relationships. But while 45 percent of adults struggle with serious sibling strife, few discuss it openly. Even fewer resolve it to their satisfaction.In Cain's Legacy, psychotherapist Jeanne Safer, a recognized authority on sibling psychology (and an estranged sister herself) illuminates this pervasive but hidden phenomenon. She explores the roots of inter-sibling woes, from siblicide in the book of Genesis to tensions in Frederique's family history. Drawing on sixty in-depth interviews with adult siblings struggling with conflicts over money, family businesses, aging parents, contentious wills, unhealed childhood wounds, and blocked communication, Safer provides compassionate guidance to brothers and sisters whose relationship is broken. She helps siblings overcome their paralysis and pain, revealing how they can come to terms with the one peer relationship they can never sever -- even if they never see each other again.A heartfelt look at a too-often avoided topic, Cain's Legacy is a sympathetic and clear-eyed guide to navigating the darkness separating us from our brothers and sisters.
Using private diary writing as her model, Catherine Delafield investigates the cultural significance of nineteenth-century women's writing and reading practices. Beginning with an examination of non-fictional diaries and the practice of diary-writing, she assesses the interaction between the fictional diary and other forms of literary production such as epistolary narrative, the periodical, the factual document and sensation fiction. The discrepancies between the private diary and its use as a narrative device are explored through the writings of Frances Burney, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anne Brontë, Dinah Craik, Wilkie Collins and Bram Stoker. The ideological function of the diary, Delafield suggests, produces a conflict in fictional narrative between that diary's received use as a domestic and spiritual record and its authority as a life-writing opportunity for women. Delafield considers women as writers, readers, and subjects and contextualizes her analysis within nineteenth-century reading practice. She demonstrates ways in which women could becomes performers of their own story through a narrative method which was authorized by their femininity and at the same time allowed them to challenge the myth of domestic womanhood.
This clearly written and wide-ranging study identifies the main features of the sensation novel, analysing its broader cultural significance as well as looking at it in its specific cultural context.
The first study to focus exclusively on the baby in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Drawing on novels by writers such as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, as well as parenting magazines and manuals, it analyses how representations of infancy shaped an iconography that has defined the Victorian age.
This eclectic collection brings together a range of critical voices, from varying disciplinary backgrounds, to comment on the life and works of Wilkie Collins. A close friend of Dickens, Collins engaged with some of the nineteenth century’s most influential ideas and cultural developments. As this collection makes clear, he formed interesting connections with key figures in literature, art, theatre, medicine, and the law. As a result, his works often engaged with the period’s most influential ideas and cultural developments. Best remembered for spearheading the Sensation genre with The Woman in White and detective fiction with The Moonstone, Collins’s career actually encompassed a large amount of material that has remained relatively neglected until recently. Wilkie Collins: Interdisciplinary Essays offers readings of previously unstudied sources while offering new perspectives on the author’s most canonical works.
The editors have transcribed 2,500 of Wilkie Collins's letters, around 700 of them previously unidentified, and have given them all a full scholarly annotation and context. The letters shed light on the personal life and business activities of this creative Victorian personality.
In the midst of a Victorian culture ingrained with strict social etiquette and societal norms, Wilkie Collins composed novels that contained asocial, even anarchic, impulses. A contemporary of Dickens, Collins creates a world more Kafkaesque than Dickensian, a world populated by doppelgangers, secret selves, oddballs, and grotesques. The essays of Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins purposefully work to expand Collins's legacy beyond The Woman in White and The Moonstone; they move well past the simplistic view of Collins's works as "sensation novels," "detective novels," or even "popular fiction," all labels that carry with them pejorative connotations. This collection represents the range of Collins's aesthetic project from various critical perspectives. New methodological and theoretical approaches are applied both to him most popular and to his lesser-known works, giving the reader a broader picture of this multifaceted and undervalued writer The Editors: Maria K. Bachman in an assistant professor of English at Coastal Carolina University. Her articles have appeared in Victorian Newsletter, Literature and Psychology, The Dickensian, and Dickens Studies Annual. Don Richard Cox is a professor of English and associate dean at the University of Tennessee. His books include Sexuality andVictorian Literature (Tennessee), Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood: An Annotated Bibliography. He is the coeditor, with Maria Bachman, of an edition of Wilkie Collins's final novel, Blind Love