Convict Voices: Women and Prison Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century

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Convict Voices: Women and Prison Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century investigates nineteenth-century prison writing and other discursive spaces where convict voices could emerge. As prison populations are reaching record levels, researchers and policy-makers are seeking new answers on women's criminality. It is now recognized that listening to prisoners' voices should play a role in this process. In the humanities, prison literature has become a core part of many curricula, including service-learning projects involving student-inmate reading groups. Uncovering historically earlier forms of prison writing and reform agendas will offer new perspectives on current penal debates of interest to women's studies, literary studies, penal history and beyond the academy, since the fundamentals of prison reform date back to and continue from this period.My research objective is to identify articulations by nineteenth-century women convicts and to trace developments in the genre of prison memoirs as a response to hegemonic accounts of criminal subjectivity, such as parliamentary papers or scientific writings. The monograph resulting from this research situates these accounts as significant precursors of contemporary (late twentieth- and twenty-first-century) prison writings which have become the subject of increased academic as well as wider public interest in recent years. The first three chapters deal with early attempts to raise awareness of the condition of female prisoners from the 1810s to the mid century. Chapter 1 considers two very different women and their interventions into penal debates: the English Quaker Elizabeth Fry and the French-Peruvian Socialist Flora Tristan. This chapter identifies female reformers like Elizabeth Fry as forerunners of present-day charities such as 'Women in Prison,' while critically analyzing earlier languages of humanitarianism that stopped short of a fully egalitarian view of prisoners. Chapter 2 argues that the last lamentations by convicts published on execution broadsides can be read as a form of displaced (auto)biography, facilitating access to and commemorating the otherwise hidden or lost forms of embodied knowledge of women prisoners. Chapter 3 analyzes Frederick William Robinson's commercially successful, but critically under-recognized, prison narratives, published in the 1860s under the anonym of 'A Prison Matron.' The chapter contends that these narratives provide an early social history approach that validates the culturally marginalized experience of non-elite women-prisoners as well as prison officers. The two subsequent chapters move on to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapter 4 reads two prison autobiographies, Susan Willis Fletcher's Twelve Months in an English Prison and Florence Maybrick's Mrs. Maybrick's Own Story: My Fifteen Lost Years, in the context of their highly publicized court cases. Although these two middle-class women (both with an American background) were atypical prisoners, the chapter argues that their accounts are uniquely enabled by their contact with other convicts and thus become ventriloquized reports about the prison experience of non-elite women. In Chapter 5 on imprisoned suffragettes, I use archival sources, some of which have only recently been made available to the public (such as the artist Katie Gliddon's 1912 diary and drawings, secretly compiled during her incarceration). This section suggests that it was in suffragette prison writing where concerns around incarceration and citizenship emerged most urgently. Finally, a postscript entitled 'Re-imagining the Past: Recovering Convict Voices in Twentieth-Century Historical Fiction' embeds readings of Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace and Sarah Waters's Affinity in wider considerations regarding women's imprisonment and the representation and mediation of convict voices in various cultural media, including the academy, at the beginning of the twenty-first century.