Book Review: The League of Lady Poisoners by Lisa Perrin

Artist and academic Lisa Perrin’s first book is a gorgeously illustrated and designed collection of biographies of that most romantic and maligned of villainesses: the poisoner. In black and gold and a bright arsenic green, this is undeniably one of the best-looking books about true crime to ever grace my desk. Professor Perrin’s drawings throughout this luxe volume evoke Edward Gorey and other masters of the Victorian macabre, bringing humor, charm, and wit to the grim topics of death and murder.

The prose is just as entertaining, though Professor Perrin is quick to remind readers that her book is neither an instruction manual nor a book about happy endings:

No good can come of poisoning someone. None of the stories shared here are happy ones. The poisoners are not the heroes; they became known as wicked women, a pastiche of every malicious Disney villainess. However, they also dared to fight back when they had been wronged, challenging the conventions of male-dominated societies that demanded passivity from them. They were feared for upsetting the status quo more than anything else, and they were often the victims of unfair and prejudiced rumors. If you find that you feel a frisson of satisfaction in reading about their dastardly schemes, you’ll find no judgment here.

The League of Lady Poisoners is an illustrated history that seeks to reconsider the impact these titular women have had on the collective imagination, and to understand the circumstances that drove them to choose murder. Some of the women described here are undeniably evil, killing for thrills or profit. Many are far more sympathetic, choosing poison as the only way to fight back against people and a system that abused them and told them to like it. Some likely aren’t even murderers but have been accused of such for so long and so often that their names are inextricable from that label in the public consciousness. 

Professor Perrin broadly divides her biographies into six chapters, going from professional poisoners with little interest in their victims all the way to those who poisoned because they cared too much. She discusses poisoners as famous as the likely maligned Lucrezia Borgia, to the much less well-known Roberta Elder, and ponders why their fame is so relative. Is it, as she posits, because the stories of young, beautiful, feminine white women are better covered by the media? Does that have anything to do with why murderers who fit that description are far more likely to get away with their crimes than women who don’t?

In support of this thesis, Professor Perrin quotes, among others, Béla Bodó, whose book Tiszazug: A Social History of a Murder Epidemic trains a similar lens on the women known as the Angel Makers of Nagyrév. The women of this impoverished 1900s Hungarian village resorted to poison to free themselves of abusive husbands whom they weren’t allowed to divorce or leave. When the murders were eventually exposed, the media attention was brutal:

The middle-class courtroom spectators and journalists seemed to revel in their superiority over these savage and uneducated women. Onlookers jeered and hoped for the harshest sentences possible, blaming the crimes on the peasant women’s selfish, cruel characters rather than their poverty, abuse, and desperation. The Angel Makers may have escaped their violent husbands, but they couldn’t escape the unforgiving public. One thoughtful journalist reported that the defendants “…caused the greatest disappointment. Instead of witches, demons, and crafty murderers we see only kind, poor, old, and broken women on the benches.”

Professor Perrin puts the poisoners’ entire stories back in the spotlight, refusing to strip their crimes of nuance or the killers themselves of all humanity. With excellent research and citations, she talks about the special fascination poison itself has long had on the imagination and why it’s (incorrectly) viewed as a particularly feminine weapon. 

This entertaining, illustrated volume is a very valuable explosion of the myths around how and why women kill. It very much succeeds in setting the historical record straight while encouraging readers to keep working towards a more just society.