Elizabeth Carolyn Miller. Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780472050444. Price: US$27.95

When I picked up Framed, I was expecting merely a pleasant investigation into an idiosyncratic sort of character. I thought the book would identify key female criminals in fin-de-siècle texts, perform close readings of those figures, and probably conclude that they were subversive by virtue of being active agents rather than passively domestic figures. However, in Framed Miller does not just do a localized study of a few characters. Instead of asking “who were the female criminals?” Miller asks a much more profound question: “why did the female criminal emerge as a major figure in this period?” In other words, the “female criminal” is not the extent of the study, but the excuse for it, and I mean that in the best possible way. For Miller uses the genre of this character to reread the entire culture. What Miller does is nothing more or less than a dissection of fundamental cultural conditions at the turn of the century. Framed is a book that is remarkable for its steady erudition, its calm authority, and its consistent maintenance of a very high standard indeed for itself. There is not a wasted word or a subpar argument. This is a meticulous and intelligent treatment of what makes modernity. This book should attract anyone who wants a more profound idea of the anxieties experienced by British subjects during the emergence of modernity. In Framed, Miller analyzes why female criminals emerged in the culture of the fin de siècle. She explores the functions this figure fulfilled, the way the female criminal allowed people to articulate complex ideas about consumerism, representation, political efficacy, and bodies. The female criminal, according to Miller, became the locus for shifting, controversial ideas about the subject in modernity, and came to stand for key elements of modern life, through stories, films, popular fiction, and canonical novels. As Miller herself explains, the book shows how female criminals worked “to embody and explain the shock of modern life” (3). Indeed, “detective series, crime film, and dynamite narrative – three emergent genres of the era – use the figure of the female criminal to define a particular vision of modern life wherein feminism, democracy, and an image-centered consumer culture are mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing” (22). Surprisingly, female criminals are protean and successful figures who use their glamorous disguises to evade capture. The audience identifies with them and hopes for their triumph. In Part I, Miller discusses female criminals in detective fiction. In a fascinating discussion of the “Sherlock Holmes” stories, she points out that although Holmes can easily use visual technologies to locate men, he has trouble “seeing” women (39). Women in the Holmes stories are inscrutable, morphing easily into other figures, and often depicted on the threshold between light and dark states. Interestingly, L.T. Meade’s popular detective fiction shares the notion that women are visible in public spaces, yet remain opaque. Miller focuses on Meade’s adaptation of a scandal of the 1860s, Madame Rachel’s trial for fraud. Rachel was a successful cosmetics entrepreneur, and when her business was put on trial (both in the real case in the 1860s and in Meade’s version, starring “Madame Sara,” a generation later) it evoked worries about the mutable female body, the racial body, consumerism, and Orientalism. Meade made Madame Sara into a modern female professional, able to mobilize scientific prowess in the cause of remarkable bodily mutability in order to gain her ends. Part II takes these concerns into early cinema. Miller uncovers a fascinating series called “Three-Fingered Kate.” “Three-Fingered Kate” and other early films make the audience identify with the female criminal, glamorizing …