Murder in Henry James' The Other House (1896)

Abstract

Especially in literature, “the landscape of unprovoked but premeditated female violence remains strangely unexplored.” Sam Tanenhaus makes this compelling statement in a New York Times article taking his cue from the case of Amy Bishop, the University of Alabama neuroscientist who shot six colleagues, killing three, in February 2010. While replete with figures of male criminals, the Western literary tradition appears to be reticent about women’s violence, a subject navigating the social world – particularly nowadays – but to which works of the imagination have difficulty in attuning.