Was that her talking or the book

Sarah Dunant’s Transgressions (1997) explores how crimes against women are named, reported, and investigated and presents the reader with a contested feminist exploration of language and the law. The novel focuses on Elizabeth Skvorecky, a translator who agrees to work on a misogynistic Czech thriller to cope with her sudden solitude following a breakup with her lover. Elizabeth lives in a large house that appears to be subject to supernatural intrusion, and she finds, as she works, that the novel she is in the process of translating ends up having an impact on her own “real life,” particularly in its recitation of violence against women. The novel thus sets a gothic romance alongside the thriller narrative, with reading, writing, and speaking about violence, all subject to a number of different interpretive frames. The phenomenon of reading impacting on the woman reader has been the focus of a range of texts from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) to Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1976), but here Dunant exceeds the boundaries of normal narrative by explicitly moving the violence – and not just fear of violence – from the page to Elizabeth’s “real life.” Elizabeth becomes a victim of a series of crimes that are not recognized as such, a fact that is crucial in her decision, eventually, to enact her own brand of law in the face of the failure of authorities to protect her. Furthermore, when she is sexually assaulted in her own home, her physical response and subsequent domination of her attacker render her an unfit (and unbelievable) victim and appear to set her outside of legal remedy

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• More Intimate Than Violence

  Tanya Horeck•Women a Cultural Review•2000

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