The Silent Woman in the “Criminal Conversation” Trial and her Displaced Defences: “A Letter Always Reaches its Destination”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the 18th-19th-century ‘criminal conversation’ legal action, a spouse could sue his wife’s lover for economic compensation. The wife was not party to the action, even though she was implicitly ‘on trial’. This article argues that the absence of the wife’s perspective permitted the court to manipulate her image conservatively and enabled English Marriage Law to evade enlightenment pressure for reform. The counter-pressure she may have exerted is deflected elsewhere. This article shows that women’s private defences could infiltrate the public imagination obliquely, if not the legal process directly, using as examples three very different letters: a purloined love letter from an adulterous wife, a fictional letter of frank testimony from Wollstonecraft’sMaria, and a forensic analysis under a masculine pseudonym from an indignant ‘victim’.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".