Reviewed by Harriet
As an erstwhile recipient of review copies of the British Library Crime Classics series, I was aware that two novels were published in 1864 featuring female detectives: Andrew Forrester’s The Lady Detective and William Stephens Hayward’s Revelations of a Lady Detective, predating Sherlock Holmes by twenty-two years. The BL introduction to Forrester’s novel asserts that when the novel was first published, ‘there were no women detectives in Britain’, a claim which is satisfactorily proved to be untrue by Sara Lodge’s research. Since the 1840s, when the Metropolitan Police established the first detective department, women were frequently used as ‘searchers’, who were expected to use their wits to find stolen goods, to examine women’s bodies for signs of violence to be used in evidence, as well as taking care of women detainees. And then there were ‘watchers’, who could do surveillance on the streets. Often used in divorce cases, which had burgeoned since the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 made divorce possible without a court order, female investigators could track errant spouses, follow possibly adulterous wives, or find evidence of previous (or current) marriages. Almost always working class, often the wives of policemen, the female detective’s class and gender made her invaluable in situations when a man simply could not go. Sara Lodge has managed to uncover the the identities of many of these women through the court testimonies that were published in the newspapers of the period. These women’s lives were not glamorous, and mostly confined to uncovering the sad secrets of females of their own class. But though they were unpaid and often unacknowledged, they played a vital part in police work.
Fiction and drama were another thing altogether. The sensation genre of the novel, highly popular from the 1850s on, featured women of the middle and upper classes both investigating and being investigated: some well known examples are Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860), in which a strong-minded young woman, Marian Holcombe, investigates and uncovers a plot against her half-sister, and his No Name (1862) whose central character assumes false identities to investigate a crime against her family, and Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861), in which a young woman disguises herself as a governess to spy on her former husband’s new family. Much less well known, however, is Catherine Crowe’s The Adventures of Susan Hopley; or, Circumstantial Evidence (1840), ‘the most influential detective story you have probably never read’, in which the female detective is a working-class servant who sets out to find the truth behind her master’s murder. As for theatre, Lodge reveals that ‘the female detective was a popular and familiar character on the stage long before Sherlock Holmes was conceived’. Unlike their counterparts in real life, whose role was working unobtrusively behind the scenes, female detectives in drama were feisty, witty women who enjoyed cross-dressing and outwitting their male colleagues. These melodramatic plays were wildly successful, for their exciting plots and elaborate stage settings:
The packed house, who knew the inner lives of the players as well as they did themselves…threw bouquets: not the usual kind – but articles they thought the recipients might be in need of – joints of meat, boots, intimate wearing apparel &c. In fact stall holders frequently had to put up umbrellas in case a parcel fell short.
There’s much more to enjoy in this lively, readable book. It has made me very much want to read some of the lesser-known novels, or to see a revival of a Victorian female-led detective play. Sara Lodge’s research is truly impressive, and the book, as well as being usefully footnoted, contain numerous images of some of the women whose real lives or stage personas are featured here. Highly recommended for anyone who has a interest in any aspect of this previously forgotten subject.
Harriet is a co-founder and one of the editors of Shiny New Books.
Sara Lodge, The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective (Yale University Press, 2025). 978-0300286601, 384pp., paperback original.
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