| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Arsenic under the Elms: Murder in Victorian New Haven. By Virginia A. McConnell. (Westport: Praeger, 1999. xiv, 260 pp. $26.95, ISBN 0-275-96297-0.)

Authors often complain that critics talk more about what they wish authors had done than about whether authors meet their own goals. Virginia A. McConnell wants her dramatic account of two late-nineteenth-century trials held in New Haven, Connecticut, each of which involved the alleged murder of a young, unmarried woman by her lover, to reach popular, as well as scholarly, audiences. As an academic reader of Arsenic under the Elms, I found it weak, but I am not qualified to speak to its possible appeal to general readers. In addition, I want to note that, because of its treatment ofprimary sources and because of its larger themes, it might work well in some undergraduate courses. . . .

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