Criminal conversation

Abstract: Acknowledgements Note on the text List of abbreviations Introduction 1. Language, sex and civility 2. Marital advice and moral prescription 3. Cultures of cuckoldry 4. Sex, death and betrayal: adultery and murder 5. Sex, proof and suspicion: adultery in the church courts 6. Criminal conversation Conclusion Bibliography Index.

Abstract: The project examines the gender relationships within the household, between master and mistress, master and servant, and within the servants’ quarters, alongside gendered experiences in the courtroom and constructions of masculine and feminine identities in printed trial accounts, and how these changed during the century. The trials also provided a context in which the spatial boundaries between the private and public could be debated and therefore offer a unique window for examining the physical development of private space in contemporary architecture. The legal procedure of the trials and the published accounts reporting them indicate a growing awareness of a “private life,” while the expanding print culture offered a perfect medium to maximize the publicizing of private life already unfolding in the court room. Crim. con. trials and the literature they inspired, therefore, represent a particularly rich set of sources for considering definitions of “public” and “private” in eighteenth-century Britain.

Abstract: This article considers Maria's two representations of herself in The Wrongs of Woman: as a sexual subject in her memoir to her daughter, and as a would-be citizen in her letter to the judge. The Wrongs of Woman, although using the novel form, can be taken as the promised second volume of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, on the “partial laws” of England. I argue that it also revises the Vindication's view of feminine sensibility, and experiments with a more radical and generous account of sexuality. Contemporary discourses on which Wollstonecraft drew include popular printed reports of “Trials for Adultery”, especially concerning the civil action known as “Criminal Conversation”.