ampampnbspIn Contempt NineteenthCentury Women Law and Literature by Kristin Kalsem explores the legal advocacy performed by nineteenthcentury women writers in publications of nonfiction and fiction as well as in reallife courtrooms and in the legal forum provided by the novel form. ampampnbsp The nineteenth century was a period of unprecedented reform in laws affecting married womens property child support and custody lunacy divorce birth control domestic violence and women in the legal profession. Womens contributions to these changes in the law however have been largely ignored because their work stories and perspectives are not recorded in authoritative legal texts rather evidence of their arguments and views are recorded in writings of a different kind. This book examines lesserknown works of nonfiction and fiction by legal reformers such as Annie Besant and Georgina Weldon and novelists such as Frances Trollope Jane Hume Clapperton George Paston and Florence Dixie. ampampnbsp In Contempt brings to light new connections between Victorian law and literature not only with its analysis of many lost novels but also with its new legal readings of old ones such as Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights 1847 George Eliots Adam Bede 1859 Lewis Carrolls Alices Adventures in Wonderland 1865 Rider Haggards She 1887 and Thomas Hardys Jude the Obscure 1895. This study reexamines the cultural and political roles of the novel in light of new evidence that many nineteenthcentury novels were lawlessshowing contempt for rather than policing the law.