Another form growing sympathy for “women's wrongs” took in the Victorian criminal courts was a fading of the powerful fears and horror earlier evoked by female killers, in contrast to the hardening attitudes towards violent men. When Thackeray fictionalized in 1839 the early eighteenth-century life of the burned husband-murderer Catherine Hayes, he intended a rebuttal to “Newgate novel” romanticization of criminals; nonetheless he treated her far more gently and sympathetically than her contemporaries had done. In Thackeray's novel, her fall starts with being seduced by a wicked aristocrat and is entrenched by being forced into loveless marriage and then by poverty: he admitted to his mother that “you see the author had a sneaking kindness for his heroine, and did not like to make her utterly worthless.”

Even the far most common mode of women's violence – against their own, often illegitimate, newborns – increasingly came to be blamed on men. In representations of infanticide between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century there was a marked increase in the use of what Christine L. Krueger has called “cover stories of natural innocence and melodramatic seduction” derived from fiction to save murdering mothers from the harsh fate decreed by the law. The early nineteenth-century popularity of the scenario of bad men seducing and abandoning naïve women encouraged magistrates, judges, and juries to look for an evil man behind the poor unmarried girl discovered with a dead newborn.