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

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.

Although the primary target audience of this monograph will be academic researchers from a range of disciplines, the ultimate motivation behind this work, like that of much feminist research, is to enhance public debate, participation and engagement, with the potential to contribute to changes in policy and community relations. More specifically, this research aims to change perceptions and representations of women's criminality and promotes the significance of creating spaces where prisoners can make their voices heard.

The non-academic beneficiaries of this research are as follows:

1. A wider audience and lay researchers interested in the history of (women's) crime and punishment and literary representations of crime:

These groups will be addressed through public talks and book launches. Dissemination will have the aim of contributing to discussion about historical changes and continuities in representing female criminals/prisoners and opportunities for prisoner self-representation. The engagement activities will challenge stereotypical representations of criminal women to help foster social understanding and community relations.

2. Charities and museums:

As a supporter of the charity 'Women in Prison', the PI will offer to disseminate the research in the context of the charity's events and distribute publicity material through the charity. The PI also has contacts in the Museum of London and the Women's Library in London, where some of the project's archival research was conducted and will distribute her findings through publicity material, talks and, ultimately, a book launch at those locations.

3. Professional and practitioner groups and local prison communities:

The PI is involved in discussions with the Scottish Prison Service on innovative projects around reading and writing in local prisons. Some of this work may consist of prisoner-student reading groups. Students will be exposed to the PI's research as part of an undergraduate module and use their understanding of the research as a basis for reflective work within prison reading groups. Student-prisoner reading groups, in turn, are aimed at promoting civic engagement, community cohesion and social inclusion by bringing together social groups who are normally unlikely to encounter each other.

4. Policy-makers at local level:

The PI's discussions with the Scottish Prison Service on projects around reading and writing in local prisons are occurring in the context of a national initiative promoting education and the creative arts in prisons. It is hoped that the research's goals to challenge objectifying discourses of women criminals and help raise the significance of prisoners' voices will feed back into the penal system in this way and have an impact on local policy (for instance by creating more opportunities for expression, in the context of reading groups and beyond).

5. Creative Industries (Film and TV):

Crime and criminal biographies have long been a mainstay of film and television work. Yet, little information exists on British women before the contemporary period for media practitioners to use. My book will help lay out the lines for transmission by creative industries and the transfer of knowledge from the academy to a wider, even non-reading, public.