Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness - Hardcover

In judging crimes of passion, where should we draw the line between the mad and the bad? This question featured prominently at several sensational trials between 1870 and 1914 as lawyers began to argue with psychiatrists over the inner lives of murderers. Focusing on three such trials in different countries, this book uses court and asylum records, letters and newspaper accounts to highlight the social debates prompted by the mind doctors new concepts of insanity.

Glorious detail is marshalled from the copious reporting of these sensational stories (Independent)

Enthrallingly narrated, Appignanesi's book compels with its gruesome subject matter and delights with a wealth of bizarre detail (Miranda Seymour Daily Telegraph)

A convincing, enlightening narrative that skilfully blends scholarship with a seductive interest in what makes us human (Observer)

Appignanesi is a fine storyteller, bringing the characters and times to life . . . This is a clear and fascinating introduction to the grey zone between criminal guilt and madness (Jewish Chronicle)

Trials of Passion is a rich and rewarding work, brimful of insight and wisdom. Lisa Appignanesi does nothing by halves, and what she says about the mind doctors might describe her own book: "their profession is an art - an art of understanding the human" (Literary Review)

Appignanesi combines a historian's expertise with a novelist's eye for lurid detail (Tatler)

A fascinating portrayal of unhinged lovers caught between lawyers and mind doctors in three turn-of-the-century court cases (Lara Feigel Observer)

Novelist, feminist, cultural critic and historian Lisa Appignanesi is an intellectual star in London where she chairs the Freud Museum, writes about women and psychiatry, and has been awarded the OBE for services to literature. Her cosmopolitan background, scholarly expertise, and narrative verve unite in this analysis of three sensational crimes of passion in England, France, and the United States, and the ways doctors and lawyers battled to explain and judge them in the courts. An exciting, enthralling and enlightening book (Elaine Showalter)

A stupendous achievement, combining brilliant historical sleuthing with masterful storytelling. Appignanesi's book offers at once a canny cross-cultural analysis of the (mis-) uses of the insanity plea and an evocative account of how our forebears a hundred years ago made sense of the lethal havoc that could be wreaked by unassuaged jealousies and amorous obsessions. Trials of Passion transforms our understanding of the origins of 'the sexual century' - the one we've just left behind, but which continues to leave its marks on our present (Dagmar Herzog, author of Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History)

A mosaic of law, psychology, and class strictures . . . Will satisfy readers attuned to the juncture of history, psychology, and feminism (Kirkus)