Fatal Women

A groundbreaking and provocative look at how violent women have been represented in literature, plays, film, and performance Fatal Women builds a complex and original theory of how the shadow of the lesbian animates representations of violent women, from the Victorian novel to films depicting women who kill. Starting from the historical link between criminality and sexual deviancy, Lynda Hart critiques constructions of gender, race, class, sexualities, and the cultural politics of the 1990s. Her introductory chapter constructs a theory of female violence across the discourses of sexology, criminology, and psychoanalysis. Subsequent chapters detail this theory in the Victorian novel and stage sensation Lady Audley’s Secret; Frank Wedekind’s Lulu Plays, which introduced the “invert” to the European stage; the films Thelma and Louise, Mortal Thoughts, and Basic Instinct; the political intersection of race and gender in Single White Female; the performance art of Karen Finley in the context of the censorship debates; the fate of Aileen Wuornos, dubbed the first “female serial killer” by the FBI; and the Split Britches’ performance Lesbians Who Kill. A major contribution to lesbian theory and cultural studies, Fatal Women is certain to be read widely by scholars, students, and anyone interested in the politics of representation.

Incarnations of fatal women, or femmes fatales, recur throughout the works of women writers in the Romantic period. Adriana Craciun demonstrates how portrayals of femmes fatales or fatal women played an important role in the development of Romantic women's poetic identities and informed their exploration of issues surrounding the body, sexuality and politics. Craciun covers a wide range of writers and genres from the 1790s through the 1830s. She discusses the work of well-known figures including Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as lesser-known writers like Anne Bannerman. By examining women writers' fatal women in historical, political and medical contexts, Craciun uncovers a far-ranging debate on sexual difference. She also engages with current research on the history of the body and sexuality, providing an important historical precedent for modern feminist theory's ongoing dilemma regarding the status of 'woman' as a sex.

World Fantasy Award winner Tanith Lee channels the allusive Esther Garber to tell these dark, erotic tales of lesbian ardor and obsession. The "fatal women" found within these pages lead exotic lives and adventures and have grim secrets. From fin de siècle Paris to Egypt of the 1930s and contemporary England, the Garber novellas create feverish dreams of danger, scandal, and sensuality. This new edition includes the novella "Femme Fatale," never before in print, as well as an essay by Mavis Haut, author of The Hidden Library of Tanith Lee, about the eminence of this collection within Lee's body of work.

In Fatal Females, investigative psychologist and former police profiler Micki Pistorius examines the minds and motives of women who kill. Throughout history the view seems to have prevailed that it is not in women's nature to commit violent crime, but Pistorius shows that this is not in fact the case. Women, givers of life, are indeed capable of ruthlessly taking life. She examines more than fifty documented cases of South African female killers, categorised according to the nature of the crime - for example, infanticide, spree killings, stalkers, poisoners - and she presents her new hypothesis to explain the psychology of that rare individual, the female serial killer.

Esther Garber is the character/novelist who inhabited Tanith Lee as she wrote Fatal Women, a collection of short novels and stories of lesbian love, both sexual and emotional. The stories' heroes and villains are women. Men, however pleasant - or atrocious - are peripheral to Garber's world. Mothers, grandmothers, peculiar aunts - and female lovers, always live out their lives centre stage. Erotic and sophisticatedly explicit, the motivation behind the histories draws from the psychology of women. But is driven by the reasonless logic of the obsessive heart. About Fatal Women In the Paris of 1900, Phhdre is an assassin. She assists female acquaintances suffering from specific male abuse - by 'removing' the abuser. Phhdre is sexually predatory but emotionally cool. Until she meets Rherlotte de Gillan in the Cemetery of St. Luc. Rherlotte's red-haired beauty and enigmatic, dignified sweetness soak relentlessly through Phhdre's shell, like honey. And soon the two women are joined in a dangerous game that is both courtship and duel. Elsewhere, in the late 1800s, the provincial town of Bois-la-Diane begins to be haunted by the dark, phantasmal creature - Virgile, the professional widow. Laure, bored with rural life, her childhood girlfriend and the disappointing 'ladies club' that holds its scandalous sessions in an old chateau, is instantly hypnotised by Virgile. But Virgile's fee is always death, and not only Laure's, but that of another. Each of the eponymous heroines who people Fatal Women has her own secret - one poisonous and potentially lethal, one bittersweet, and one that concerns perhaps the most priceless painting on earth.

"I'd gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom," cries impetuous Rosamond Vivian to her callous grandfather. Then, one stormy night, a brooding stranger appears in her remote island home, ready to take Rosamond to her word. Spellbound by the mysterious Philip Tempest, Rosamond is seduced with promises of love and freedom, then spirited away on Tempest's sumptuous yacht. But she soon finds herself trapped in a web of intrigue, cruelty, and deceit. Desperate to escape, she flees to Italy, France, and Germany, from Parisian garret to mental asylum, from convent to chateau, as Tempest stalks every step of the fiery beauty who has become his obsession. A story of dark love and passionate obsession that was considered "too sensational" to be published in the authors lifetime, A Long Fatal Love Chase was written for magazine serialization in 1866, two years before the publication of Little Women. Buried among Louisa May Alcott's papers for more than a century, its publication is a literary landmark—a novel that is bold, timeless, and mesmerizing."