Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siecle.(Book review)

Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siecle, by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller; pp. v + 284. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008, $75.00, $27.95 paper, 62.95 [pounds sterling], 24.50 [pounds sterling] paper.

From the cover of Framed--featuring the unapologetic "Three Fingered Kate" flashing her three fingers--to its combination of texts ranging from the canonical (by Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, Joseph Conrad) to the obscure (early British cinema), Elizabeth Carolyn Miller's book takes a refreshing, wide-ranging look at a complex figure emerging in the Victorian twilight: the New Woman criminal. In apprehending this criminal, a figure who, Miller argues, unsettles our current understanding of the relationship between feminism, consumerism, crime, and modernity itself, readers can "recover the often surprising forms that feminism took at this crucial moment in women's history" (22). The New Woman criminal is neither strictly the New Woman, the …