with an emphasis on women's lives, pathology, criminality, and drug cultures. Wilson is the author of Voices from the Asylum: Four French Women Writers, 1850-1920.
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Most Quiet Murder: Maternity, Affliction, and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century France, and shared the following:
Page 99 of my book is the opening page of Chapter 5 entitled ‘The Trial’. It is the last chapter before my conclusion, ‘Afterlives’.Learn more about A Most Quiet Murder at the Cornell University Press website.
This chapter’s opening immediately places the reader inside a historical true‑crime narrative. Opening with a trial in Dijon in 1883, it tells us that the book deals with a violent crime and its legal consequences. Even without prior context, a reader would understand that they are reading a story inflected by law, justice, and the societal reverberations of a mysterious death, a murder for which two people are standing trial.
The page also shows that the book is as much about people and surrounding society as it is about the crime itself. The detailed portraits of legal advocates Étienne Metman and Paul Cunisset reveal key facts about the personalities and social positions of those involved. Their backgrounds, beliefs, and later achievements suggest that the legal world of provincial France is not just part of the mise-en-scene, but at the foreground of the story.
Although it reveals quite a lot, the page does not uncover all the elements that are to be found at the emotional or thematic heart of the book. It misses the centrality of womanhood, female suffering, and the broader social a medico-legal meaning of the crime. The reader does know that the case centres on a woman accused of abducting and killing a child, nor that the narrative explores the fragility and vulnerability of women’s and children’s lives in the 1880s. The eventual acquittal of Pierre Fiquet and the moral complexity it introduces also remain hidden.
Because of this, the Page 99 Test is only partially successful for my book. It offers a compelling moment, a clear sense of genre, and a strong historical tone, all of which could entice a reader to continue, or to flip back to find out the details of the story as it unfolds in the early chapters of the book. It mirrors the book’s prevailing tone, which keeps the reader engaged through its emphasis on human experience. But it withholds many of the deeper themes, strange mysteries, and dark places of human motivation that give the book its full power.
--Marshal Zeringue
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