摘要：Contemporary culture displays an enduring fascination with re-visiting high profile Victorian murder cases, as evident from the copious ‘true crime’ studies available on the period. Besides the plethora of modern-day investigations into Jack the Ripper, these include works like T.A. Critchley and P.D. James’ The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders 1811 (1971), Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008), adapted for television in 2011 (dir. James Hawes), and even a comic book series by Rick Geary, A Treasury of Victorian Murder (1995-2007). Unsurprisingly, neo-Victorian literature evinces a similar trend, with a distinct subcategory emerging within the genre’s bio-fiction, concerned with re-imaging the lives of nineteenth-century convicted or suspected criminals, as well as those that, quite literally, got away with murder. Some of the better known works on such subjects include Beryl Bainbridge’s Watson’s Apology (1984) and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996), while the historical figure of Lizzie Borden has attracted not just fiction writers like Angela Carter (‘The Fall River Axe Murders’, 1985; ‘Lizzie’s Tiger’, 1993) and Elizabeth Engstrom (Lizzie Borden, 1991), but also filmmakers and composers of the musical, ballet, and opera.
