What was behind Jane's outbursts? What led her to spin troubling stories? What led her to scream “sexual irregularity” when she perceived herself unwanted, humiliated, or scorned? These questions have perturbed all those who have ever studied her. After taking into account her post-case life, I decided that four factors, presented here in ascending order of long-term significance, are responsible: race-based prejudice, erotic sensitivity to situational and contextual stimuli, stress and anxiety, and child maltreatment.

The first factor contributing to Jane's outbursts, race-based prejudice, has received much attention in the course of this book. Lillian de la Torre was spot-on when she said, apropos of the Jane who destroyed the teachers, that exposure to this kind of discrimination warps the mind of the victim. However, racism doesn't seem to have been at the root of Jane's eruption against her husband. This is not to say that it couldn't have been a factor. Tulloch was furious with Jane, and in his fury he might have hurled raceinflected epithets at her. The villagers who sided with Tulloch opined that she was the blacker of the two. Was the comment also an invidious allusion to her complexion and birthplace? But there is no hard evidence, as there is in the case of Margaret Stuart Bruce Tyndall, that behind Jane's back the Dallas folk qualified their respect for their minister's wife with snide remarks about her complexion. In fact, circumstantial evidence suggests otherwise, as the majority of the Dallas parishioners followed her lead and joined the Free Church.

I turn now to the second contributing factor, that Jane had an erotic sensitivity to situational and contextual influences.1 Because of her age, the cloistered environment in which she was living, and the teachers’ affectionate conduct toward each other, I think she was aroused by the behaviors that romantic friends and sexual partners have in common. This resulted in her crush on Miss Woods and her propositioning of Janet Munro. Because something similar happened in the 1830s when she had been married to Tulloch for close to twenty years, I could not write her behavior off as a “lesbian until graduation” phenomenon.