The book recounts a sensational criminal case in which a magnetic aristocratic woman was accused of prompting others to commit murder and was sentenced to imprisonment. It reconstructs her fragile heredity and years of ill health, the sequence of events leading to arrest and trial, and contemporary medical testimony that attributes her abnormal behavior to a chronic blood-borne disorder affecting the nervous system and producing periodic seizures. Interwoven with narrative detail is an explicit argument that many female transgressions have pathological origins and that diagnosis and medical treatment should often replace purely punitive responses.