Incarnations of fatal women, or femmes fatales, recur throughout the works of women writers in the Romantic period. Adriana Craciun demonstrates how portrayals of femmes fatales or fatal women played an important role in the development of Romantic women's poetic identities and informed their exploration of issues surrounding the body, sexuality and politics. Craciun covers a wide range of writers and genres from the 1790s through the 1830s. She discusses the work of well-known figures including Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as lesser-known writers like Anne Bannerman. By examining women writers' fatal women in historical, political and medical contexts, Craciun uncovers a far-ranging debate on sexual difference. She also engages with current research on the history of the body and sexuality, providing an important historical precedent for modern feminist theory's ongoing dilemma regarding the status of 'woman' as a sex.

In Fatal Females, investigative psychologist and former police profiler Micki Pistorius examines the minds and motives of women who kill. Throughout history the view seems to have prevailed that it is not in women's nature to commit violent crime, but Pistorius shows that this is not in fact the case. Women, givers of life, are indeed capable of ruthlessly taking life. She examines more than fifty documented cases of South African female killers, categorised according to the nature of the crime - for example, infanticide, spree killings, stalkers, poisoners - and she presents her new hypothesis to explain the psychology of that rare individual, the female serial killer.

Esther Garber is the character/novelist who inhabited Tanith Lee as she wrote Fatal Women, a collection of short novels and stories of lesbian love, both sexual and emotional. The stories' heroes and villains are women. Men, however pleasant - or atrocious - are peripheral to Garber's world. Mothers, grandmothers, peculiar aunts - and female lovers, always live out their lives centre stage. Erotic and sophisticatedly explicit, the motivation behind the histories draws from the psychology of women. But is driven by the reasonless logic of the obsessive heart. About Fatal Women In the Paris of 1900, Phhdre is an assassin. She assists female acquaintances suffering from specific male abuse - by 'removing' the abuser. Phhdre is sexually predatory but emotionally cool. Until she meets Rherlotte de Gillan in the Cemetery of St. Luc. Rherlotte's red-haired beauty and enigmatic, dignified sweetness soak relentlessly through Phhdre's shell, like honey. And soon the two women are joined in a dangerous game that is both courtship and duel. Elsewhere, in the late 1800s, the provincial town of Bois-la-Diane begins to be haunted by the dark, phantasmal creature - Virgile, the professional widow. Laure, bored with rural life, her childhood girlfriend and the disappointing 'ladies club' that holds its scandalous sessions in an old chateau, is instantly hypnotised by Virgile. But Virgile's fee is always death, and not only Laure's, but that of another. Each of the eponymous heroines who people Fatal Women has her own secret - one poisonous and potentially lethal, one bittersweet, and one that concerns perhaps the most priceless painting on earth.

Looks at how violent women characters disrupt cinematic narrative and challenge cultural ideals.

"I'd gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom," cries impetuous Rosamond Vivian to her callous grandfather. Then, one stormy night, a brooding stranger appears in her remote island home, ready to take Rosamond to her word. Spellbound by the mysterious Philip Tempest, Rosamond is seduced with promises of love and freedom, then spirited away on Tempest's sumptuous yacht. But she soon finds herself trapped in a web of intrigue, cruelty, and deceit. Desperate to escape, she flees to Italy, France, and Germany, from Parisian garret to mental asylum, from convent to chateau, as Tempest stalks every step of the fiery beauty who has become his obsession. A story of dark love and passionate obsession that was considered "too sensational" to be published in the authors lifetime, A Long Fatal Love Chase was written for magazine serialization in 1866, two years before the publication of Little Women. Buried among Louisa May Alcott's papers for more than a century, its publication is a literary landmark—a novel that is bold, timeless, and mesmerizing."

Biografie van de Nederlandse danseres Mata Hari (1876-1917), die in de Eerste Wereldoorlog in Frankrijk ter dood veroordeeld werd vanwege vermeende spionage voor de Duitsers.

Informed by film theory and a broad historical approach, Fatal Desire examines the theatrical representation of women in England, from the Restoration to the early eighteenth century—a period when for the first time female actors could perform in public. Jean I. Marsden maintains that the feminization of serious drama during this period is tied to the cultural function of theater. Women served as symbols of both domestic and imperial propriety, and so Marsden links the representation of women on the stage to the social context in which the plays appeared and to the moral and often political lessons they offered the audience. The witty heroines of comedies were usually absorbed into the social fabric by marrying similarly lighthearted gentlemen, but the heroines of tragedy suffered for their sins, real or perceived. That suffering served the dual purpose of titillating and educating the theater audience. Marsden discusses such plays as William Wycherley's Plain Dealer (1676), John Vanbrugh's Provoked Wife (1697), Thomas Otway's Orphan (1680), Thomas Southerne's Fatal Marriage (1694), and William Congreve's Mourning Bride (1697). The author also addresses tragedies written by three female playwrights, Mary Pix, Catharine Trotter, and Delarivier Manley, and sketches developments in tragedy during the period.