Ensemble member and Miss Holmes Returns Dramaturg, Maren Robinson put together a reading list of a few female Victorian sleuths if you feel like following up Miss Holmes Returns with some more detective fiction!
A few years ago I picked up the anthology, The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, and went down the rabbit hole of Victorian and Edwardian female detectives. The British public had an appetite for mysteries and there as a proliferation of female detectives. In fiction at least the public was comfortable with women taking the lead in solving crimes.
The subversiveness of women in this role may have been part of the thrill. The rise of the “New Woman” who rides a bicycle or holds a job or doesn’t do what she was told was both a threat and a fascination. In most cases, the woman is forced into being a detective through economic circumstances or an injustice that must be righted and when the series reaches a conclusion, she recedes back into domestic life keeping the public confident in the return to the Victorian social order.
Most of these novels were written by men with a few notable exceptions like Anna Katherine Green. In 1897 The Affair Next Door was published featuring Green’s nosy spinster Amelia Butterworth who be the prototype for nosy spinster crime solvers everywhere.
If you want to do a deep dive into female detectives, Olivia Rutigliano offers a vast and well-researched list of Victorian Women Detectives in her article for Lapham’s Quarterly, “The Lady is a Detective.”
My picks for places to start reading:
- Violet Strange, Anna Katherine Green’s other female detective is a diminutive upper-class detective with “an elusive. . .ever-changing expression” who solves mysteries in her own class where detectives are resented for her own mysterious reasons. The Golden Slipper and other Problems for Violet Strange collects all her mysteries.
- Mrs. Paschal, the creation of Williams Stephens Hayward in 1864 is the first professional female detective in fiction. She works for the Metropolitan Police on cases that might be trick for them to handle. Revelations of a Lady Detective. The book is available in old editions and one of the stories appears in The Penguin Book of Victorian Crime.
- Finally, Loveday Brookes was also created by a woman hiding behind the initials C. L. Pirkis, Catherine Louisa Pirkis. As such she defies some of the tropes that were beginning to develop around female detectives, she is ordinary, neither strikingly beautiful or feminine and is keenly aware of injustices done to servants and immigrants. Her stories are stand-alone stories collected in The Adventures of Loveday Brookes.
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