Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
My teaser this week is from Victorian Murderesses by Mary S. Hartman a book that is so much more than a simple re-hash of the true-crimes committed, this book also addresses the issues facing middle-class women in Victorian England.
Blurb
This riveting combination of true crime and social history examines a dozen cases from the 1800s involving thirteen French and English women charged with murder. Each incident was a cause célèbre, and this mixture of scandal and scholarship offers illuminating details of backgrounds, deeds, and trials.
“The real delight is that historian Mary S. Hartman does more than reconstruct twelve famous trials. She has written a piece on the social history of nineteenth-century women from an illuminating perspective: their favorite murders.” — Time Magazine
My Teasers
Madeline Smith was seventeen in 1853 when she returned home to Scotland from boarding school near London; she was nineteen when she met and established a secret liaison with a poor but ambitious twenty-six-year-old Jerseyman of French extraction named Emile L’Angelier
These letters, over sixty of which were introduced in evidence during the nine days’ trial, chronicle a relationship which captivated a Victorian public with an already keen appetite for crime and illicit sexual adventure in high places.
No prizes for guessing why I chose this particular murder to select my teasers from!
Please leave the links to your teasers in the comments box below.
