Adriana Craciun is Lecturer in English and Director of the Centre for Byron Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is the editor of Zofloya, or the Moor (1997) and A Routledge Literary Sourcebook for Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (2002), and co-editor of Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution (2001).

• List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; List of abbreviations; Introduction; 1. The subject of violence: Mary Lamb, femme fatale; 2. Violence against difference: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson and women's strength; 3. 'The aristocracy of genius': Mary Robinson and Marie Antoinette; 4. Unnatural, unsexed, undead: Charlotte Dacre's gothic bodies; 5. 'In seraph strains, unpitying, to destroy': Anne Bannerman's femmes fatales; 6. 'Life has one vast stern likeness in its gloom': Letitia Landon's philosophy of decomposition; Bibliography; Index.

'It is a strong, thoroughly-researched, ingenious study with many difference insights to offer, and the fact that it provokes as many questions as it answers is a mark of its scope that does not detract from its value.' Romanticism