Using the mid-twentieth-century example of the so-called ‘Mummy in the Cupboard Murder’, Lizzie Seal examines the significance of the Gothic to understandings of crime.
In a case that hinged on forensic evidence, Sarah Jane Harvey, the owner of a boarding house in Rhyl, North Wales, was tried for the murder of Frances Knight, whose naturally mummified body was discovered in a locked cupboard in the house in 1960.
The book applies Gothic criminology to an empirical historical case, considers the interchange between fact and fiction, traces developments in mid-twentieth-century forensic pathology, and contributes to historical criminology by extending the conceptual basis of this approach.
Join us at the Westminster Forum, Wells Street, where Lizzie will be in discussion with Dr Daniel Conway, Reader in Politics and International Relations.
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About the speaker
Lizzie Seal
Lizzie Seal is Professor of Criminology at the University of Sussex. She is also the author of Women, Murder and Femininity: Gender Representations of Women Who Kill (2010, Palgrave); Transgressive Imaginations: Crime, Deviance and Culture (with Maggie O'Neill, 2012, Palgrave); Capital Punishment in Twentieth-Century Britain: Audience, Justice, Memory (2014, Routledge); Imaginative Criminology: Of Spaces, Past, Present and Future (with Maggie O'Neill, 2019, Bristol University Press); and Gender, Crime and Justice (2021, Palgrave).
Lizzie is principal investigator for the Leverhulme Trust-funded project Imagining Race, Crime and Justice in Sailortown 1870–1939.
