Took me a while to get into to but once I did it was an enjoyable read, it bought to love that Murder by arsenic poisoning seemed to be the way to go if you was a woman who needed help and no one wanted to help you.

The premise of this book was very interesting. The title is also intriguing enough to make me want to read this. I have long loved murder mysteries, particularly when the criminal is a woman. So, this should be perfect, right? Wrong. I just couldn't get into the style of pieced-together original articles. I'm sure this has appeal for other people, I'm just not the right audience, I guess.

I'm afraid that this book is just appallingly written. It is nearly impossible to follow the author's train of thought when his sentences are so poorly constructed. I was constantly coming up against unexpected and unneeded punctuation or strangely constructed clauses, to the point where I could not take in the information that was meant to be conveyed. The style is poor, too - it is not detached enough to be a straight history book (the authorial voice offers judgement on basic facts through the use of exclamation marks and asides), but it is written in such an overblown way that it is clear it is attempting to be formal and scholarly rather than an anecdotal social history. Simply unreadable.

Princess Fuzzypants here: Murder by arsenic poisoning seemed to be a popular way to “off” an unwanted spouse or any other tiresome individual. It was so common that the sale of arsenic was monitored closely lest it be used for nefarious purposes. The purveyors of this method of death were largely female and in the case of this book, mostly of a poorer class and often uneducated. In a justice system skewed mightily towards the male of the species, not all those convicted were guilty. In fact, this book makes a convincing arguments that even ones who might truly have committed the act, in a different courtroom, they would have been acquitted or found not proven.
With murders of this sort, the death sentence was the normal conclusion. Sadly for many of the women described in the book, there was no recourse once sentence was passed. In the rare occasion the sentence was commuted but it did not compensate for the miscarriage of justice. There was even the famous case of Florence Maybrick where the judge, clearly suffering from Alzheimer’s, bullied the jury into convicting an innocent woman.
Filled to the brim with testimony from the various trials, it often makes for tough but fascinating reading. No doubt many of the egregious errors would have been challenged in a modern court or at the very least appealed. No such opportunity existed. It make the reader grateful to live in a different era where the scales of justice are not so heavily weighted in favour of the prosecution..
Four purrs and two paws up.

'Misjudged Murderesses' by Stephen Jakobi examines eight cases of wilful murder by poisoning by working class women.

The premise of the book looked very interesting and the historical aspect all drew my attention to this book ,but what could have been a enjoyable read turned out be a difficult read. The lay out had no structure and I was very confused by what the author was trying to relay to the reader the book was full of long extracts from trial reports and press coverage reports which I think unnecessary who's sole purpose seems only been to fill out the pages. The book quotes Jakobi's as taking a forensic approach to these cases but I found no evidence for this I unless missed something.

There will be some people who will enjoy this book but I'm sadly not one them.

In Misjudged Murderesses, Jakobi examines eight cases in Victorian England. All eight involved accusations of wilful murder by poisoning by working class women. This book was a fascinating account of the legal system with its middle-class, male bias. In all cases, there was a lack of evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the women accused were guilty, but with biased press reporting and lack of access to adequate legal representation, they were all found guilty by juries. Even more alarming was that at this time defendants in criminal cases were not allowed to give evidence in their own defence. Furthermore there was no right to appeal from the trial verdict. For anyone interested in true crime and history this is a compelling read, extensively researched and incredibly detailed.

Misjudged Murderesses by Stephen Jakobi was a difficult book to read. I found the idea great but sadly I felt the book was hard to follow and disjointed in the articles in it.

I struggled though but its not a book I would go back to.

Thanks to Netgalley and Pen and Sword for the ARC of this book.

What should have read as a case study of each of the trials, testimonies of witnesses and forensic evidence, came across as a mish-mash of ideas that chopped and changed with each case study.

What I personally would have preferred and what I feel, as a reader, would have been more engaging, is a study of miscarriages of justice where poison featured, and using the examples of not only the women presented herein but also others to highlight these misnomers and inconsistencies in the court proceedings, whilst providing an analysis of guilt or innocence.

I just felt that whilst the premise was intriguing - it was just the execution that was lacking and detracted from what should have made for a highly readable history and study of the court system as it was applied in these examples. I just felt the book could have been set out and formatted a little better, and the cases as presented used to support the author's stance.

Sorry but I couldn’t finish this book. Normally I would persevere but I gave up. I’m sure this would be very good if it was someone’s thesis but as a book No. Very choppy. Mainly a list of excerpts from old documents and newspapers.
Unfortunately unable to recommend this one.

Subtitled “Female Injustice in Victorian Britain an investigation into 8 cases resulting in sentence of death” you might begin to understand the main thesis of this book. Jakobi, a lawyer with background in exploring modern miscarriages of justice has turned his attention to the 19th century. He has established a list of women found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, checked the evidence and come up with a list of those he believes were innocent of the charges or should not have been convicted under the standards of the time. Those women are discussed in the book.
Each will be presented. The evidence used will be taken from primary documents if they survive, or more often from contemporary newspapers. If you read “true crime” there may well be names you recognise – Jakobi will rely on a number with extensive publications around them – others will have possibly passed under your radar. Most are working class women, with the exception of the most notorious - Florence Maybrick. The method of killing is poison – a crime closely attributed to women even now.
While presenting interesting facts on poisons used in Victorian agricultural and retail practises, Jakobi will focus in greater detail on “poisoning scares”. Suggesting that widely publicised trials of undoubtedly guilty women, often mass murderers, could lead to allegations of poisoning in sudden death situations. With women responsible for cooking and food preparation they would be at greater risk of false allegations.
Coming to this book I was very disappointed. I am interested in history, read true crime and have also been aware of at least some of the feminist analysis and publication of the last 30 years + that indicates that women were often be found guilty on “reputation” rather than the legal evidence. With access now to online newspapers, it is clear that trials to conviction do not represent the whole picture. Neither do those cases that are more commonly publicised. But I would have been looking for some clearly presented case histories and then some (of the promised) solid analysis of possible bias
The way that the case evidence is presented is confused and erratic, more like research notes than a book. Some of this is because it appears that the analysis of “poisoning panic or bias” is mixed with it. But all vary in style. On occasions newspaper articles are presented at length – and very interesting they are too. Obviously only in a few cases have primary legal records been accessed so these can be eye-opening. But overall it made for a more complicated read than necessary.
But the big minus is the lack of coherent and detailed analysis of the proof of gender bias. We all know that it was undoubtedly there. We know that the legal system was directly discriminatory. We know that it might have affected the results of trials, but there is very little clear analysis evidence given here.
Most of the women were working class; a fuller examination of the class bias against them would have been welcome. A consideration that working men accused of poisoning might also be innocent might have been interesting. From a lawyer it might have been useful to consider that with coroner court decisions in place an automatic assumption of guilt was built into the higher court decisions. Additionally things can be complicated by a woman’s local reputation (true or false) as well as hostile or self interested witnesses, topics not fully discussed here.
So the overall criticism is that there is not sufficient focus in this book – on presentation, on analysis, on what is relevant (and not – see the Maybrick chapter). But behind that is, I suspect, a lack of proper awareness of other key research on similar topics. Reading some of this might have lead to deeper clarity on the nature of bias and how it operated. Rather a wasted opportunity on what should have been an important topic.

While this seemed like a tremendously promising idea, the execution was poor. The book is basically a series of reprinted newspaper articles strung together with some conclusions and presented without any attention to narrative or flow. I can’t recommend it.

This may sadly be the fastest I have DNFed a book. This is so poorly put together that I thought there had to be formatting issues until I read enough of it to realise that it's just the style. There is no attempt to make this readable-it honestly reads like a list of examples with no attempt to string them together or do anything but post extracts from other works/newpapers etc. I expect my nonfiction books to at least have the structure of a basic essay (introduction to the topic, why it matters, why you're giving these examples instead of just listing them). Maybe strictly as a reference book it would be useful but this is not for a non-academic reader.

This ARC was courtesy of netgalley - all thoughts and opinions are mine and unbiased

The premise of this book has much merit but I think it misses a lot in its execution

Maybe I made an assumption in thinking the book would be more of a novel / historical fiction rather than a series of case studies - its more the type of book a law student would read

There's nothing wrong with that but I feel maybe the publishers have missed where the book should sit and take a look at how the marketing for the book is being done. I just don't think this is a mass market type book but more of a 'niche' and marketing to the niche might work best. It would probably work well as a documentary type publication.

The author has led with the facts of trials rather than adding his own analysis to it so it feels more like a collection of articles rather than having a real 'voice'

It may be, of course, that I have missed the point but its not a book that grabbed me hugely

This book seemed to have an excellent premise. It was about how innocent Victorian women were falsely accused of murder and executed. However, this book was very hard to follow. The book was very disjointed and the author went on many tangets. Thus, it was hard to understand the author’s arguments. Still, I recommend this for anyone interested in the Victorian era. Full review to come!

This had a fantastic premise and some great information. Unfortunately I couldn’t finish the book as I was very confused by the layout, and found it difficult to read the large excerpts interspersed.

A disappointing book. I hate giving up on books especially those I have requested for review but having endured the first 30 % and finding nothing good to say about it, I decided it was time to move on. A book about possibly wrongly convicted women where the cases were reexamined sounded like a fascinating concept but sadly the execution was lacking. The book is a poorly organized collection of court documents and press clippings directly transcribed with little to no original thoughts or ideas from the author. It is a constant barrage of names and dates with the minimum of explanations of why they are important.
I read and reviewed an ARC copy courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.

The title of this new book makes clear that its author is not going to sit on the fence. In detailing the cases of six women who were found guilty of murder in the 19th century, he intends to show that they were ‘misjudged’ – by the press, by their juries, by judges, and, perhaps, by the public. Unfortunately, though, he doesn’t really show anything of the sort.

This is the main failing of the book – it’s not so much a re-examination of these women’s stories, as much as a regurgitation. Much of the book actually consists of long extracts from trial reports or press coverage – an easy way to write a book, of course, as it involves little analysis or thought. In some cases, Jakobi’s own contribution is a short comment at the end, or a strange and unnecessary observation about his own work as a legal bod working on cases in countries that have, to his mind, poor legal systems.

His scorn for the coverage of The Times seems rather over-the-top, too, and his explicit feelings about bias or distortion in newspaper accounts feels odd in light of his admittance at one point that he has edited one newspaper report himself to better illustrate its bias! Similarly, his thanks to the descendant of one individual for letting him use his own written account of the case fails to acknowledge that a family member’s account may, in itself, not be the most impartial account to draw on.

It’s clear that Jakobi has a thesis: that male landowning juries disliked working class women and were therefore prejudiced against them before they had said a word. He also believes that the Victorian legal system was endemically flawed, and that poorer women were failed by the system and a lack of defence in some cases. But to try and prove this thesis, he has simply gathered together a disparate collection of cases and tried to convince the reader that they are all strikingly similar.

Firstly, they are not. For a man who makes clear that he has noted a misogynistic society at play here, he has a tendency to lump these women’s experiences into one homogenous ‘thing’. Yet these women’s lives were individual, as were, no doubt, their feelings towards those they were later accused of killing. Reading through the cases, I am never left with the feeling that they were innocent – there might have been ways in which they could have had a better defence, but I do not feel they were ‘misjudged’.

And to try and make a sweeping comment about attitudes towards working-class women makes me wonder why the notorious case of Florence Maybrick was included; it feels so different to the other cases, and has been so widely explored by others, it feels as though it was included more to make the numbers up as anything else – oh, and it gives the author the chance to shoehorn in a paragraph about Jack the Ripper, too, which is completely unnecessary given the book’s alleged remit.

Jakobi seems to think he is breaking new ground here, ignoring the work done by crime and legal historians who have looked both at the failures of the Victorian legal system and the impact of gender in murder cases (and why, when he comments that it is ‘amazing’ that any Victorian woman was acquitted, does he not explore this? Is it because it makes his thesis a bit shakier?). It would have been good to see this work acknowledged and referenced in his book; there is one citation to historian Dr Katherine Watson, but here he uses the name she is commonly known by – Cassie – rather than her professional name, which would make it hard for anyone who wants to go and research her work (there’s also a strange description of a postgraduate thesis he has used for research as being by an ‘adult Canadian student’, and I’m not sure quite what he means by that).

In short, the book might help readers learn about different murder cases in the 19th century, about the use of poison in such cases, and about how newspapers covered these cases – as well as providing evidence of how a murder verdict was not necessarily the end of the case. But for a more nuanced approach, and a more thoughtful, coherent, analysis, rather than simple cutting and pasting of newspaper reports or TNA files, the reader will need to look elsewhere.

This book really makes you think, it was well researched and I was never bored when reading it. I think the author does a very good job in doing the research.

Interesting cases and make dominating Victorian culture. I found the premise of the book very interesting and the historical aspect fascinating. Just fell flat in spots.

Stephen Jakobi examines 8 cases of women sentenced to death in the Victorian era.
I absolutely loved the idea of this book. Thought it would delve in to forensics and new evidence to determine who was guilty and who wasn't. Instead I read articles reprinted and more articles, witness statements then the opinion of the author on whether he thought they were guilty or not. I persisted but this just didn't hold my attention. The first couple of chapters were very difficult to read as they didn't flow very well and kept jumping from the different sources. I thought once the book got in to the specific cases it would improve and it did slightly but the majority of the information was sources recited rather than opinions or references. A little let down by this after such high hopes.