Stephen Jakobi examines 8 cases of women sentenced to death in the Victorian era.
I absolutely loved the idea of this book. Thought it would delve in to forensics and new evidence to determine who was guilty and who wasn't. Instead I read articles reprinted and more articles, witness statements then the opinion of the author on whether he thought they were guilty or not. I persisted but this just didn't hold my attention. The first couple of chapters were very difficult to read as they didn't flow very well and kept jumping from the different sources. I thought once the book got in to the specific cases it would improve and it did slightly but the majority of the information was sources recited rather than opinions or references. A little let down by this after such high hopes.

The cover was very intriguing and caught my eye. The novel itself though was a bit difficult to follow. It just lost me in the first chapter. I think the potential is there for an amazing novel.

This book lacked a convergent narrative and purpose I’m afraid. It had snippets of fascinating information such as it’s insights into the Victorian male dominated legal system but there was no coherence to the cases or the arguments.
I am sorry to say I DNF this.

I loved the idea of this book - misogyny in the Victorian legal system on the example of wrongly convicted women. I didn't expect that the book would be a collection of case files consisting of witness statements and newspaper articles as direct quotes and it was at times difficult to understand. I would've liked to hear the author's voice more often, the book fell a bit flat for me like this.

An interesting little book that has fascinating insights into the Victorian legal system and it's systemic culture of misogyny. However, instead of focusing on a case-by-case examination, the author chose to instead jump from topic to topic, which was quite disorienting. Despite this, I feel like I walked away with more knowledge about the time period than I had before reading this book.


A special thank you to Netgalley for providing me with a free advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

IF THE PURPOSE OF THE BOOK ISN'T CLEAR... THEN THERE'S NO POINT IN READING IT!

DNF at 46%

Okay, so, I feel like I gave this one a fair chance. I kept waiting for the turning point, where I would finally find out, why this book was written and why I needed to read it. But honestly, if that point hasn't come halfway through, it's just not coming. And then I am just not reading it.

WHAT I DISLIKED

Structure: Or, lack thereof. The first 25% of this book jumped from one thing to another without a common thread, keeping it together. Very discombobulated and messy.

Purpose: For non-fiction books there can be two purposes - entertainment or examination/investigation. Honestly, I cannot for the life of me figure out, which purpose this book served!

Wikipedia: Everyone - except for the author of this book - knows, that you do not use Wikipedia as a source!!!

Research?: One thing that really jumped out at me early on was the fact that the author very openly, and almost proudly, states, that he has really not done any research himself. This book is based upon research done by others.

Endnotes: First of all, I prefer footnotes. But, more importantly, I simply just want notes! End, foot, in the end it doesn't matter as long as it is there! This book has almost no notes! In fact for the chapters 14-23 there literally are no notes! WTF?!

Source collection: There is a difference between non-fiction and source collections. You can't have it both ways, in my opinion. I don't read non-fiction to read the sources, I want the authors opinion on the sources and a reference to the sources used so that I can read them myself if I so chose. If you use 4-6 pages for printing an entire source (multiple times!) without hardly any comment just makes me wonder 'why are you even involved in this book when you didn't write most of it?'

MISJUDGED MURDERESSES combines two of my favorite things – the Victorian Era and murder. Specifically, murder by arsenic poison. Stephen Jakobi looks at the cases of six Victorian Era women who were convicted of poisoning someone (or multiple people) with arsenic and hypothesizes on whether these women were innocent or guilty. According to the book’s description, Jakobi takes a modern forensic approach with these old cases. Maybe I missed something, but I really didn’t find anything related to modern forensics in the book. Jakobi occasionally gave his opinion on whether or not he thought the woman was guilty or not. But his opinion didn’t really seem to be based on anything forensic. Jakobi mainly relied on reprinting the original newspaper articles and court/prison records from back in the day. These verbatim original writings were hard to read – especially since the incorrect spelling was left as is. Some of them went on for multiple pages without any paragraph breaks. These original writings really didn’t always explain what happened – or what was thought to have happened – and I grasp of the alleged crime. The material was interesting, but the way it was presented fell very flat.