f modernity" (80).
While Victorian novelists did not ignore what they perceived as a shift in women's moral and behavioral landscape, and despite abundant evidence of real-life inputs that in the modern period seem made for novelistic treatment, detailed presentations of women as either accused or actual criminals are fairly rare in the fiction of the era. Even critical examinations of the Victorian sensation novel tend to focus on heroic, victimized, and justified characters--Collins's Woman in White is a particularly favored subject (Showalter 1ff; Miller 107-8)--rather than those who either are or are accused of being criminal, as if admitting the possibility of self-conscious female criminality somehow invalidates the analysis of women's social alienation and the fact of class oppression of the powerless. Yet as the rich narrative of Tess demonstrates, a woman destined for the gallows can be understood and pitied in terms of social injustice without being romanticized into the bargain. Further, this gap in the analytical literature fails to explain the psychology, behavior, and society's complicity therein for such characters as Lucy, the prostitute who takes up with Mr. Hyde; the seduced and abandoned Emily, whom David Copperfield rescues from London's squalid demi-monde; Nancy, who loves Oliver Twist but loves Bill Sikes more, to her great cost; and the criminal women whom Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes encounters from time to time. There is also a provocatively titled unpublished dissertation about how Trollope exploited penny-dreadful conventions when creating villainous women (Deal).
It is the contention of the proposed study that social critique can be teased out of the connections between the criminality or quasi-criminality of Victorian women characters and the cultural environment in which they were created. The purpose of this study is to determine from the range of novelistic portrayals of women's criminality in Vict...