The short answer is… very.
Although literary scholars have long been aware of the existence of Victorian lady detective stories—at least since the 1970s, when Michelle Slung collected fifteen extant narratives published from the 1860s to the 1940s for the anthology Crime on Her Mind—major revisits to and reappraisals of this canon did not commence until after the millennium. Before then, the lady detective was read (both intra- and extra-textually) as a woman uniquely subjugated and overshadowed by her male counterparts.
To critics like Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan, writing in 1981, the lady detective was a figure who merely confirmed Victorian attitudes about female inferiority and dependency: a curious specimen frozen in subservience and reflecting the contemporarily perceived binary of mental ability across the sexes. Kathleen Gregory Klein has argued that the point of the lady detective stories was to capitalize on the public’s interest in imagining what this figure would be like without challenging any contemporary gender norms or advocating for women to join the workforce.
But the recent scholarly work into the lady detective canon has worked hard to unearth the ways that these characters challenged stereotypes against female ability, aptitude, and purpose—and in doing so, many scholars have paid attention to the unusual circumstances presented by the lady detective’s body and its exertions, research that I build on in this chapter’s appraisal of the highly visible actress’s body that transforms during the process of becoming a detective. Importantly, in 2000, Birgitta Berglund analyzed how the vigorous self-sufficiency of these lady detectives challenges the traditional object position of female characters in Victorian fiction.
Shortly thereafter, J. A. Kestner sought, with his 2003 book Sherlock’s Sisters, to integrate the forgotten marvel of female-driven detective fiction into the mainstream Victorian canon, reading the lady detective as a heretofore-unknown strain of “New Woman”—reflecting the Victorian era’s new normativity of female boldness and independence in part through the adoption of physical, masculine-coded activities, from bicycle-riding to detection.
Following Kestner, numerous scholars including Deborah Parsons, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, and Dominique Gracia have studied the lady detective as a complex proto-feminist figure in her own right—one who exists outside traditional heteronormative frameworks, whose appeal stretched across varied audiences, and who was much more than simply an exceptional woman whose existence as such reenforced the monolithic rule of male detective superiority (in her own time, as well as in modern critical assessments).
Miller has analyzed the lady detective character Loveday Brooke as not only presenting a critique of “gender ideology” and a demand for autonomy to as wide an audience as possible but also participating in a culture that had already begun doing that, especially on a bodily level (for example, Miller notes, the character’s stories were published in magazines that displayed advertisements for abortifacients).
Miller reads Brooke as offering a new archetype for female freedom and bodily control. Gracia has expanded on Miller’s research, analyzing the ways that the lady detective’s specifically feminine body offers numerous tools (including “proximity” and “sympathy”) to solve cases, and as a result, subverts Victorian social protocols. Clare Clarke notes, in her discussion of the metaphorical framework of the detective Hagar Stanley’s pawnshop and Hagar’s refusal to commodify herself, how such stories elaborately de-objectify their single, female protagonists—even while the story, by its very nature, folds all lady detectives into an industry (publishing) that collects and capitalizes on various unorthodox skills or behaviors.
There is room for continued analysis of this figure—in large part due to the overwhelming number of lady detectives who populated mainstream British fiction during this period. In 1864, two books featuring women detective protagonists were published to competing popularity. W. Stephens Hayward’s Revelations of a Lady Detective follows the exploits of a police detective named Mrs. Paschal, and Andrew Forrester’s The Female Detective is about a mysterious lady investigator known as “G.” Both books are collections of short stories.
In addition to introducing the figure of the lady detective protagonist, both also featured some of the first appearances of the figure of the detective protagonist, full stop. Unlike novels such as Bleak House (1852-53) or Aurora Floyd (1863), in which detective characters appear as part of large ensembles and mystery plotlines that progress amid a network of others, both Forester and Hayward’s books principally follow the varied adventures of a single sleuth—a trope that would soon be ubiquitous in detective fiction, but was, at the time, rather uncommon. Holmes’s first appearance was in the novella A Study in Scarlet, published in Beaton’s Christmas Annual in 1887—more than two decades after the appearances of Mrs. Paschal and G. For context, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, which is credited as being the first English detective novel (though it does not follow the exploits of an individual detective), was published four years after Revelations of a Lady Detective and The Female Detective, in 1868.
Stories about lady detectives thrived in the Victorian era and continued through the Edwardian; I have counted at least eighteen lady detective protagonists in English fiction from 1864 to 1916, and I believe this to be the most comprehensive, up-to-date count.[9] Many of these characters appeared in mass-market, yellow-backed books or serialized, mainstream periodicals like The Strand or Ludgate Monthly. In addition to Mrs. Pascal and G, readers could follow the exploits of such intrepid sleuths as Miriam Lea (1888, Leonard Merrick), Dora Bell (1891-94, Mrs. George Corbett), Loveday Brooke (1893, Catherine Louisa Pirkis), Annie Corey (1894, Mrs. George Corbett), Lady Rose Courtenay (1895, Milton Danvers), Dorcas Dene (George R. Sims, 1897), Lois Cayley (1899, Grant Allen), Hagar Stanley (1899, Fergus Hume), Mollie Delamere (1899, Beatrice Heron-Maxwell), Dora Myrl (1899, M. McDonnell Bodkin), Florence Cusack (1899–1900, L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace), Hilda Wade (1900, Grant Allen), Diana Marburg (1902, L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace) Bella Thorn (1903, Tom Gallon), Lady Molly Robinson-Kirk (1910, Baroness Emma Orczy), and Judith Lee (1911–16, Richard Marsh).
This list enumerates the lady detectives who were labeled and marketed as such, but popular Victorian sensation fiction also featured many female characters who modeled the qualities ascribed to lady detectives, despite technically lacking the proper titling. As early as 1856, Wilkie Collins wrote about an inquisitive and dogged amateur lady investigator in his short story “The Diary of Anne Rodway,” which was published in Household Words. He subsequently incorporated similar characters in his later serialized novels: Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White (1860, All the Year Round), Magdalen Vanstone in No Name (1862, All the Year Round), and Valeria Brinton in The Law and the Lady (1875, Graphic).
Mary Elizabeth Braddon featured two female characters who rely on amateur sleuthing—Lady Sibyl Penrith and her niece, Coralie Urquhart—in her 1894 murder mystery Thou Art the Man. In 1888, the English writer Fergus Hume published Madam Midas, featuring an intrepid businesswoman-cum-investigator named Mrs. Villiers (the eponymous “Madame Midas”). And in 1897, Bram Stoker wrote one of the era’s most indelible female investigator protagonists, Mina Harker, in his novel Dracula. Despite their different approaches to detection, all these characters are pivotal players in the formation and evolution of this canon.
This is an enormous canon to have lived in relative oblivion for so long. Scholars including Klein suggest that this is because these lady detective stories do not contribute to Victorian literature in a productive or worthwhile manner—lady detectives do not experience professional autonomy or public renown as their male counterparts do. Indeed, most are agents working for male detectives— disguise-wielding foot-soldiers, middle(wo)men enacting detection’s necessary performance to extract information so their superiors, male detectives, do not have to separate themselves from their logical work. Instead, these male superiors can simply churn a conclusion from their female associate’s results—reading the evidence she has gathered for the client at hand.
In these stories, male detectives typically stay in their rooms while their female counterparts often explore London and interact with its denizens, which is a productive reversal of the traditional spheres of influence afforded to both genders. It might seem undermining, then, that these vigorous, on-the-go lady detectives often travel through such public spaces only to arrive at new domestic ones (in disguise as maids or as ladies calling on suspects at home), scenarios which threaten to quarter or restrict them even more than if they were simply solving cases in their armchairs at home.
And yet, because the lady detective is ultimately in the domestic space under false pretenses—combining female domestic labor with male-coded deduction and evidence-gathering—she subverts and challenges the space even if she submits to it.
Despite the many different readings about the progressiveness of this canon, it has long been the scholarly consensus that the lady detective fundamentally embodies a challenge to Victorian social norms, flipping power and presumed ability across gender lines.
As Joy Palmer has explained, in detective fiction, the investigation process feminizes all of its subjects, due to the penetrating, masculine-coded nature of scientific deduction. The “dominant” figure of the detective is masculine (regardless of the detective’s actual gender); as subjects of the detective’s gaze, victims and criminals and ordinary citizens are united, all ripe for examination and determination by the masculine gaze. Lady detectives take up this gaze, embody masculine abilities, and are rendered, according to Klein’s metric, as “honorary males” as well as “[deviants]… [distanced] from the proper role of Woman.”
Similarly, Miller has noted a similar sense of transgressiveness related to “the female body’s resistance to interpretation” and how it is ultimately indecipherable to the male ratiocinative mind (let alone the mind of a layman); stories from this era are full of woman whose identities and intentions are not exposed by physical signs, tells, or expressions, even to the extent where characters safely presumed to be men turn out to be women in disguise. Miller analyzes, in stories about male detection and female criminality, in particular, how the true and frightening nature of the female body is that it can appear any which way without betraying a sense of true identity.
Many nineteenth-century lady detective stories both observe and take advantage of what Laura Marcus calls “entrenched cultural images of femininity”—proposing that women make for ideal detectives simply because no one would suspect them of being detectives. The “emotional” female essence was not only perceived as incompatible with the male-coded faculty of reason, but, in the words of Elizabeth Grosz, “a source of interference in, and a danger to, the operations of reason.” Indeed, in the 1899 novel Dora Myrl, The Lady Detective, a man tells Dora Myrl that he finds her profession “incongruous… for a charming young lady,” adding “I won’t say comical.” He asks her, telegraphing the skepticism of the zeitgeist, “do you think that women can fairly pit themselves in mind and body against cunning and strong men. Indeed, the lady detective’s best disguise is most often her gender.
