Christine L. Krueger. Reading for the Law: British Literary History and Gender Advocacy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-8139-2893-7. Price: US$39.50/£35.50

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English witch trials might seem an unlikely place for a Victorianist to open her study of legal advocacy. Christine Krueger makes a strong case, however, for the role of both breadth and depth in this erudite and expansive book. She reaches both synchronically and diachronically to bolster her argument with insights from history, legal studies, and literary studies, and reads literature and the law as interdependent. Her interdisciplinarity and broadly informed argumentation fleshes out storytelling in the public domain and the courtroom to better evaluate strategies for gender advocacy. Focusing on legal frameworks of precedent (thus the turn to the long history of witchcraft trials), agency, testimony, and motive, Krueger locates forms of gender advocacy which only become evident when this range of fields is brought to bear on one another. Indeed, so rich is the argument that I can only touch upon some of its key points here. Beginning with the witchcraft trials, Krueger argues that “the more intent legal authorities were to convict women of witchcraft, the more they authorized female legal authority”(67), inviting women into the courtroom as a crucial voices. This isn’t the key to gender advocacy, however, according to Krueger. She argues that compelling men to imagine themselves subject to the same kinds of anomalous evidence created the legal and social shift (72)—indeed, this is part of the reason she is so keen to establish that women didn’t exclusively fall victim to such charges. She reads the evolution of historical literary realism (like Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Lois the Witch”) as a response to “the very pressures so strikingly manifest in the witchcraft trials and their legacy, namely conflicts among cultures of evidence” (96). Literature, by discrediting the spurious evidence deployed in witchcraft trials, as well as grappling with the vexing truths and trauma, played a role in legal history. Krueger then moves forward into the eighteenth century and to questions of legal agency. Here, she discusses the “Reasonable Person” standard offered in Mary Wollstonecraft’s fiction—an alternative to the “Reasonable Man” standard that reigned in court. Krueger argues that the “flawed” novel, Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (published posthumously in 1798), brings unreported wrongs to “a jury” of both male and female readers in “an experience of [Habermasian] intersubjective communication” (113). By virtue of its form, the novel could “[stage] the contest between public modes of representing subjectivity and private subjective experience to demonstrate the logical difficulties produced by medical and legal definitions of insanity and to expose their mercenary interests” (117). To explore legal agency, Krueger next engages nineteenth-century texts, lunacy, and lunacy reform. It is here that her expertise in the nineteenth century makes for an especially engaging book. In these chapters, she argues that the marriage and property laws before the 1880s made women more vulnerable to wrongful lunacy incarceration—deployed primarily to seize control of women’s wealth. Here, too, she contends that literary advocacy had to make such concerns relevant to men. She particularly examines Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (1863) and the incarceration of women like Rosina Bulwer Lytton. Krueger indicates that both literary advocacy in novels and journalism drove a series of reforms, emphasizing that it was “shrewd” to avoid feminist advocacy, and to focus instead on economic abuses to which men were liable as well as women (152). We have failed to trace such patterns of advocacy in the past, according to Krueger, because our attention to canonical literature with high aesthetic appeal has rendered us blind to much literary advocacy. Tracing a “polarization” of legal discourse and aesthetic discourse (159) in her section on testimony, she demonstrates …