Trials of Passion - Hardcover

Appignanesi, Lisa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1605988146 ISBN 13: 9781605988146

Publisher: Pegasus Crime, 2015

Synopsis

Using sensational crimes committed in America, Britain, and France, this dramatic narrative takes madness and passion into the courts and puts these provocative themes on trial.

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.

About this title

About the Author

Lisa Appignanesi is the prize-winning author of many books, including Mad, Bad and Sad, and All About Love, as well as a number of novels and a family memoir, Losing the Dead. She is a former President of English PEN and Chair of the Freud Museum, London. She was awarded an OBE for services to Literature in 2013. She lives in London.

Review

“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.”
- Publishers Weekly

“Enthrallingly narrated, Appignanesi's book compels with its gruesome subject matter and delights with a wealth of bizarre detail.”
- The Daily Telegraph

“Strange and fascinating.”
- The Observer (UK), Best Book of the Year

“Appignanesi shows a country in the grip of profound cultural changes, many of them involving views of the proper place and behaviour of women; questions of honour and reputation and the ways they might properly be defended; and, most importantly, debates about how the passions might manifest themselves in everyday life. I suspect Trials of Passion will find a broad audience, and deservedly so.”
- Times Literary Supplement (reprinted in the Wall Street Journal)

“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.”
- Booklist

“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.”
- Jewish Chronicle

“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.”
- Library Journal (starred review)

“A convincing, enlightening narrative that skillfully blends scholarship with a seductive interest in what makes us human.”
- The Observer

“A stupendous achievement, combining brilliant historical sleuthing with masterful storytelling. Appignanesi's book offers at once a canny cross-cultural analysis of the (mis-) uses of the insanity plea and an evocative account of how our forebears a hundred years ago made sense of the lethal havoc that could be wreaked by unassuaged jealousies and amorous obsessions. Trials of Passion transforms our understanding of the origins of ‘the sexual century’ ― the one we've just left behind, but which continues to leave its marks on our present.”
- Dagmar Herzog, author of Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History

“Trials of Passion mixes sex, scandal and psychiatry in a way as exciting as today's headlines and as rich as yesterday's archives.”
- Edmund White, author of 'Inside A Pearl: My Years in Paris'

About this edition

• Publisher: Pegasus Crime
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1605988146
• ISBN 13: 9781605988146
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448