Loveday Brooke:
the 'lady detective' as career woman
Chris Willis
Birkbeck College
The typical turn of the century 'lady detective' is young, pretty and single. She almost invariably meets the love of her life at an early stage in her adventures, and spends the rest of the book either trying to clear him of a criminal charge or dragging him along as her admiring assistant on all kinds of adventures. Catherine Louisa Pirkis's Loveday Brooke is untypical in every way. She is "a little over thirty years of age" (Catherine Louisa Pirkis: The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, Dover, 1986,, p 2) and not particularly attractive:
"She was not tall, she was not short, she was not dark, she was not fair; she was neither handsome nor ugly. Her features were altogether nondescript" (p2)
She dresses in a way which plays down her femininity and sexual attractiveness: "Her dress was invariably black, and was almost Quaker-like in its neat primness" (p2) She is unemotional and determinedly career-minded, a "business woman hard at work at her profession" (p8) - a concept virtually impossible to imagine 20-30 years earlier. When she adopts a disguise it is usually that of a professional woman such as a schoolteacher, amanuensis, nursery governess or house-decorator: a reflection of the widening (if still limited) range of professions considered 'acceptable' for women. Throughout her adventures, the emphasis is firmly on Loveday's detective abilities rather than her sexual attractions. In her detective work, she uses 'male' qualities of logic and observation rather than the infamous 'feminine intuition' which was to become the stock-in-trade of many female investigators.
Loveday is the antithesis of her slightly later and more flamboyant contemporaries Hagar Stanley, Lois Cayley, Hilda Wade and Lady Molly of Scotland Yard . Unlike them, she does not demonstrate her femininity by becoming involved in a love affair whose successful conclusion causes her to abandon detection for the dubious delights of supposed marital bliss. She bears more resemblance to the her two predecessors of the 1860s, 'G' and Mrs Paschal, both of whom are thoroughly professional and do not engage in romantic involvements which distract from the story. Some years later, Somerset Maugham expressed the popular opinion that "marriage bells have no place in a detective-story" ("The Decline and Fall of the Detective Story" in The Vagrant Mood, Heinemann, 1952, p 107), but to turn of the century authors, marriage seemed to be the almost inevitable fate of the female detective.
By the end of the 1890s, the fashion in fictional female detectives had moved from professional businesswoman such as Loveday, 'G' or Mrs Paschal to sexually attractive young women who was less threatening to male 'superiority' because she could be married off on the final page. Unlike these women. Loveday shows no need whatsoever for a male partner in life. She is the 'modern woman' who, as contemporary male commentators repeatedly complained, showed no interest in marriage or children and was therefore a threat to the stability of society. In an article on the 'Woman Question' in the Fortnightly Review, Grant Allen complained that some:
"women of the cultured classes ... eschew marriage altogether ... which surely shows a lamentable weakening of wholesome feminine instincts." ('Plain Words on the Woman Question', Fortnightly Review, 1October 1889, pp 448-458, p 457).
Allen's own detective-heroines are sexually attractive young women who combine detection with romantic involvement, and whose adventures cease upon marriage or immediately after.
Loveday is one of the few fictional portraits of a happily single, independent woman earning her own living in the decades before the First World War. In fact, such women had to face appalling prejudice. In the 1890s, the independent, unmarried woman was a rare creature. As Michele Slung points out in her introduction to the Dover edition of Loveday's adventures:
"until well into the twentieth century, it was problematic to delineate in fiction a respectable economic, intellectual or spiritual place for the unattached woman." (Introduction to Catherine Louisa Pirkis: The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, Dover, 1986, p vii)
Unmarried adult women were generally presumed to be either bitter, frustrated spinsters or prostitutes. Interviewed in the late 1980s, Elizabeth Dean, then Britain's oldest surviving Suffragette, said that she felt that the greatest advance in women's position since getting the vote was that:
"Now a woman can get married or not, as she likes. she doesn't mind. Nobody throws things at her or sneers." (quoted in Angela Holdsworth: Out of the Dolls' House: The Story of Women in the Twentieth Century, BBC, 1988, p 179)
As late as 1910, Hilaire Belloc, in his capacity as MP for South Salford, seriously proposed that the female franchise, if it was ever granted, should be restricted to wives and mothers, as they were the only women who had fulfilled their responsibilities to society. According tothe Suffragette journal Votes for Women, (July 15 1910, p 690) His speech was cheered by the (all male) House of Commons. (It is worth remembering that Belloc's sister Marie was a suffragist, as was their mother Bessie Rayner Parkes. Marie had paid for his university education, without which he would have stood little chance of becoming an MP. Gratitude and family loyalty evidently did not figure strongly among Belloc's virtues.) Unlike unmarried men, unmarried women were expected to feel, as Belloc put it, "disappointed". His scathing comments about "every woman who wanted to lead her own life - whatever that may be" reflect the bafflement of many men who could not understand the female desire for independence. In fiction, Sherlock Holmes could happily set up a bachelor establishment and embark on an unconventional career for the sheer joy of it, but for a woman to do so without a strong romantic or financial motive would have been straining the readers' credulity to the utmost. Pirkis soon establishes the fact that Loveday is driven to detection by poverty rather than by any unladylike desire to have a career.
Loveday bears more resemblance to Sherlock Holmes than to any of her female peers. Indeed, she achieves the almost impossible feat of having an even less active sex life than Holmes! Holmes has a lingering affection for the beautiful Irene Adler, but Loveday never expresses admiration for any man in any sense other than the purely professional. Her adventures appeared in six short stories in the Ludgate Monthly from February to July 1893, the heyday of the Holmes stories in the Strand. It seems likely that Pirkis modelled her heroine on Holmes, at least to some extent, rather than on the flamboyant and adventurous New Women whose deeds of daring graced the pages of many a monthly magazine of the period. Michael Cox sees her as one of "a plethora of imitations and variants" of Holmes which graced the monthly magazines of the 1890s (Introduction to Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection, Oxford University Press, 1992, p xxi).
She is certainly one of the earliest, and closest imitations of Holmes. Cox points out that by the mid to late 1890s, detective story writers tried to effect a "deliberate distancing of the detective from the ascetic, hawk-faced image established by Holmes" , but this had not yet come into effect at the time CL Pirkis was writing. As Alan K Russell points out, most turn of the century detectives were created after Holmes's "death" in 1893 (Introductory note to Alan K Russell (ed): Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Castle, New Jersey, 1978, p viii). Loveday was created while he was still "alive". She can be seen as a female version of Holmes in her professionalism, lack of sexual involvement, wide-ranging knowledge of obscure topics and ability to pick up vital clues from apparently minor and unimportant details of a case.
Some of Holmes's distinguishing traits are specifically masculine, such as his liking for pipe-smoking and pistol practice. Although New Women were beginning to smoke, and some women had doubtless learned to shoot, both habits were mainly masculine preserves. Loveday has only one distinguishing mannerism, and that is asexual:
"her once noticeable trait was a habit she had, when absorbed in thought, of dropping her eyelids over her eyes till only a line of eyeball showed; and she appeared to be looking out at the world though a slit, instead of through a window" (p2).
Although the mannerism itself is not particularly feminine, in a woman it has connotations of purdah: the woman imprisoned by male society can only "look... out at the world through a slit" instead of taking an active part. However, Loveday's narrow view is only physical, not mental: in the course of the stories she makes use of a wide range of obscure knowledge of all sections of society including those which a "lady" would not be expected to have encountered in her sheltered life. Her detective abilities are supplemented by a knowledge of cabmen's slang (p14), millenarian religion (p83), heraldry (p68) and "certain low-class penny readings given in the South London slums" (p12).
Despite her knowledge of slums and working-class slang, Loveday is emphatically a 'lady', as were most turn of the century female detectives, with the notable exceptions of the gypsy Hagar Stanley and the millgirl Edith Dexter. Detective work, however, is not a 'ladylike' career, and Loveday has been driven to it by poverty:
"Some five or six years previously, by a jerk of Fortune's wheel, Loveday had been thrown upon the world penniless and all but friendless. Marketable accomplishments she had found she had none, so she had forthwith defied convention, and had chosen for herself a career that had cut her off sharply from her former associates and her position in society" (p2).
Her former social position is a hindrance rather than a help in her career. Many people consider her to be "too much of a lady" (p3) for the job. As Michele Slung points out:
"The very essence of criminal investigation is antithetical to what was considered proper feminine breeding, involving as it does eavesdropping, snooping and spying, dissimulation, immodest and aggressive pursuit and physical danger" (p xi).
Baroness Orczy's Lady Molly of Scotland Yard faces similar prejudice: "some say she is the daughter of a Duke, others that she was born in the gutter" (Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, p 1), the underlying assumption being that a real 'Lady' would not betray her class by joining the police. As in the days of Wilkie Collins, the law and the lady are seen as incompatible opposites.
Loveday's employer, Ebenezer Dyer, values her for her professional qualities rather than for her class or sexual attractiveness. He considers her "the most sensible and practical woman I have ever met" (p3) and praises her shrewdness and common sense, attributes which she uses to good effect in the stories. Sense, shrewdness and practicality were not among the attributes expected of a 'lady' at the time: a 'womanly' woman was expected to be emotional, dependent and impractical, relying on male protection to deal with life. (George Bernard Shaw makes great play on this notion in his fin de siècle comedy The Philanderer.) One of the qualities Dyer approves of in Loveday is her ability to obey male orders, which faculty he feels is "rare among women" (p 3), and doubtless becoming rarer in the era of the rebellious and independent New Woman. Michele Slung points out that:
"it is intended as a mark of jocular approbation that Loveday can do so, in fact it is a sign of her uniqueness that she chooses not to" (p xi).
In fact, it is usually Loveday who gives orders to her male colleagues rather than vice versa, and her relationship with Dyer is that of a lightly bickering friendliness between equals. They are almost like husband and wife in their closeness and the fact that they present a united front in public:
"Whatever might be the differences of opinion in which these two indulged in private, they were careful never to parade their differences before their clients" (59).
Their disagreement at the start of one case is "in part to be attributed to the biting east wind" (p 58). This may well be a conscious reference to Bleak House, in which Jarndyce blames the east wind for his bad moods. As FS Scwarzbach points out, the east wind was a literal source of discontent for many Londoners (FS Schwarzbach: Dickens and the City, Athlone Press, 1979, p 126). London was heated by millions of coal fires, and the prevailing west wind blew the smoke down the Thames Valley and away to sea, which is one reason why the more expensive and exclusive parts of London were in the West End. An east wind would blow smoke back into London, causing heavy smog.
In all of Loveday's cases, she is called in by men who are unable to solve the mystery. In six of the seven stories, it is the police who call her in; in one ("Drawn Daggers") it is a private client. In the six cases where she works with the police, Loveday has policemen at her beck and call. They accept her as an equal or a superior. Like Holmes, she is often called to solve cases which have baffled the police. The fact that she is a woman adds extra bite to the stories: not only is a civilian succeeding where the police have failed, but a woman is succeeding where men have failed. Unlike Lady Molly and her assistant Mary Granard, Loveday makes no political capital out of her gender. Lady Molly's adoring assistant cannot resist hammering home the point that "women have ... ten times as much intuition as the blundering and sterner sex" (Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, p 3). Loveday feels no need to gloat over her male colleagues in this way: she simply gets on with her job. Her pride in her work is concerned with her working methods, rather than with gender rivalry. At the end of one case, she tells her baffled police colleague:
"I would have admitted you long ago into my confidence, and told you step by step, how things were working themselves out, if you had not offended me by criticising my method of doing my work."
She usually demonstrates her abilities by actions rather than words. Unlike Lady Molly, she does not face sexual prejudice from her male colleagues. As a member of Scotland Yard's fictional 'Female Department', Lady Molly is "dreadfully snubbed by the men" (Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, p 2), who feel that women should be assigned only minor cases. Loveday is treated with respect by her colleagues, and sees society's largely dismissive attitude to women as an advantage to her in surveillance work: "women detectives are more satisfactory than men, for they are less likely to attract attention" (p31).
The first Loveday Brooke story, "The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep" concerns that staple of Victorian detective fiction, a country-house robbery. The scene of the robbery is described with a precision which foreshadows many 1920s and 1930s writers' use of maps and diagrams of such locations. Unlike the 1930s country house mysteries however, the suspects lie among the servants, not the guests, particularly on an attractive French maid, Stephanie. Foreigners are often objects of suspicion in Victorian fiction, a tradition which continued well into the twentieth century. Loveday visits the house and gains most of her clues from conversation with the housekeeper: like her predecessors, she knows the value of women's gossip to the detective. Like Holmes, she does not reveal the significance of what she has found out until the end of the story, baffling both the reader and her colleagues. Although she has been called in by the police, the police detective is confident of his own ability to solve the case. As in many stories involving non-police detectives, this confidence is misplaced, and the civilian detective succeeds where the police fail.
An unusual feature of the case is that Loveday builds up a picture of the criminal through her understanding of his sense of humour, which she deduces from clues he left behind. When she finds a man who has access to the whose and who is known for a similar sense of humour, she realises that he is likely to be the culprit - an early example of "psychological profiling"! Her deductions are not simply a matter of character study, however, but are backed up by solid evidence. In this case, her success stems from her appreciation of criminals as individuals rather than as 'sinners' or abstract embodiments of evil - a characteristic which she shares with her earlier counterparts Mrs Paschal and 'G':
"I notice that while all people are agreed as to the variety of motives that instigate crime, very few allow sufficient margin for variety of character in the criminal. We are apt to imagine that he stalks about the world with a bundle of deadly motives under his arm, and cannot picture him at his work with a twinkle in his eye and a keen sense of fun, such as honest folk have sometimes when at work in their calling" (p 11).
Loveday's second adventure, "The Murder at Troyte's Hill" bears a strong resemblance to the Holmes story "The Gloria Scott", which appeared at roughly the same time. Both stories feature a blackmailing servant who holds a position of power in the household because he knows of a dark secret in his master's past, and whose authority in the household is resented by the master's only son, who does not know of the blackmail. "The Adventure of the 'Gloria Scott'" appeared in the Strand of April 1893. "The Murder at Troyte's Hill" appeared in the Ludgate Monthly of the previous month. It is possible that Conan Doyle may have plagiarised Pirkis's idea, but as the copy deadline for the April Strand may well have been earlier than the publication date of the March Ludgate Monthly, it is more likely that the similarities of plot are due to pure coincidence. It is possible that both stories were based on a topical case in real life, but this is pure hypothesis as I have not had time to make a thorough search of contemporary newspapers.
Again, Loveday is called in by the police. The Newcastle Constabulary are "very jealous of outside interference" but their insularity has been overcome by their need to have Loveday's "sharp wits at work". Class may well be an issue here: as a "lady", albeit an impoverished one, Loveday would be able to mix in country house circles where a policeman would not. All of her cases begin among the upper-middle classes, although in four of them ("The Black Bag Left on A Door Step", "The Redhill Sisterhood", "Drawn Daggers" and "The Ghost of Fountain Lane") the wrongdoer turns out to be working class. In two of her cases she is called in to investigate the disappearance of a young lady - a delicate matter better handled by a 'lady' detective than a 'common' policeman! At Troyte's Hill, Loveday reveals a rare clue as to her background and education. She is familiar with the habits of Oxford undergraduates. Women were admitted to Oxford at this time, but they could not take degrees. It is possible that Loveday may have received an Oxford education, foreshadowing university-educated lady detectives such as the 'Girton Girl' Lois Cayley and Cambridge wrangler Dora Myrl.
Loveday's powers of observation are used to good effect, making a "thorough and minute investigation" of a suspect's bedroom and discovering vital clues in the process. Her personal bravery is also put to the test: she is shut in a room with a mad murderer. She is rescued in the nick of time by the police, but this is not such a reliance on male ability as it appears, as they are acting on her orders. She has arranged for them to lie in wait and to storm the room when she gives a signal.
The story involves a strange case of male impersonation. Young women who disguise themselves as boys or young men are not uncommon in nineteenth century sensation and detective fiction. At the conlusion of Conan Doyle's "A Scandal in bohemia", Holmes' adversary and innamorata Irene Adler tells him, "Male costume is nothing new to me. I often take advantage of the freedom it gives". (I refrain from comment on what this may or may not reveal of Holmes' sexual preferences!) In the popular Victorian story of Sweeney Todd, the heroine, Johanna, disguises herself as a boy in order to spy on Todd. Mrs Paschal tracks down an evil Countess who carries out her crimes disguised as man. The case Loveday investigates strains credulity more than any of these though, as the impersonator manages to deceive a (male) doctor who examines her. Odd cases of mistaken identity are one of the less convincing features of the Loveday Brooke stories: in another case a man mistakes the dead body of his estranged wife for that of their daughter. Pirkis stresses that the there is a close physical resemblance between the two women, but one would assume that even the most distracted of fathers would notice that his supposed daughter had apparently aged twenty years overnight.
In "The Redhill Sisterhood" Loveday investigates a mysterious order of nuns. Thankfully this is not another Gothic tale of evil nuns torturing an innocent young novice - a popular theme in sensational Victorian fiction. Some thirty years early, Mrs Paschal's adventures had included the investigation of an evil Abbess who tortured a young heiress she was holding captive. At least one 'Penny Blood' of the same time, Edward Ellis's Ruth the Betrayer, included lengthy descriptions of sadistic nuns flogging a pregnant novice and tormenting another novice, who is eventually rescued. By the time that Pirkis was writing, such stories had become clichéd. Pirkis makes a passing reference to them: a man tries to convince Loveday that the evil nuns have taken his fiancé from him. The naturally cynical Loveday is unconvinced by such a feeble attempt to distract her attention from her main suspects. As well as taking a side-swipe at this stock plot of sensation fiction, Pirkis is somewhat cynical about the detective fiction which has taken its place. Loveday remarks that:
"the popular detective stories, for which there seems so large a demand at the present day, must be, at times, uncommonly useful to the criminal classes" (p 34).
This is one of the few stories in which Loveday relies on intuition, although it is supplemented by observation and deduction in the best Holmesian manner. She tells Dyer that she knew the nuns were innocent of any crime because they are so obviously fond of the children in their care. This seems to be a triumph of sentimentality over logic: then as now, many inmates of women's prisons were mothers. Her attitude is particularly odd coming from one who distrusts the value of appearance. Referring to the Victorian belief in character being written upon the face, she asks how any "rabid physiognomist" would account for the ugliness of a perfectly innocent suspect as contrasted with the handsome good looks of the man who actually committed the crime. At a time when eugenists were trying to define the physical characteristics of 'criminal types', this was a very valid query.
"A Princess's Vengeance" is the only story in which Loveday is called in by a private client. The police have "as good as dropped" the case of a "young, pretty, friendless" girl who has disappeared. According to turn of the century feminists, disappearances of young women were often connected with the so-called 'White Slave Traffic' which male authorities found it convenient to ignore. Pirkis does not consider this possibility, which is not surprising considering that the 'White Slave Traffic' would not have been discussed in polite society at the time. However, the fact that the police are dragging their heels in the case may well reflect the police attitude to the such disappearances, particularly if the victim did not have rich or influential friends.
In this story, Loveday makes no secret of the fact that she is a detective. In fact, she deliberately draws attention to her profession in order to watch her suspects' reactions. She does not work in the way that they expect. One of them asks her:
"how do you propose to begin your investigations - by going over the house and looking in all the corners, or by cross-questioning the servants?" (p53).
In this case, Loveday does not use such obvious methods, but gains most of her clues from "light gossip". This could be seen as the use of feminine rather than masculine methods, although the analogy cannot be pushed too far as Loveday also uses the Holmesian techniques of observation and deduction.
"Drawn Daggers" is the only case where Loveday is called in by a private client. The Rev Anthony Hawke has been receiving what he thinks are messages from a secret society. (Perhaps he had read the Sherlock Holmes story "The Five Orange Pips" which appeared in the Strand of the previous November!) Meanwhile his niece has lost a valuable necklace, but does not wish to have the matter reported to the police. Dyer thinks it obvious that the young lady has disposed of the necklace herself, but Loveday cryptically tells him that "Sometimes ... the explanation that is obvious is the one to be rejected, not accepted" - a remark worthy of Holmes himself! She subjects the messages to a careful scrutiny before giving a Holmesian analysis of the handwriting. In very little time, Loveday solves both mysteries, revealing yet another case of imposture. This time, instead of a sister impersonating her brother, a maid impersonates her mistress.
Like the other impostures in the stories, this one relies mainly on social expectations. Because the clergyman and his wife are expecting a 'lady', they are ready to believe that the woman who arrives to stay with them is their niece (who has spent many years abroad), and let her ladylike mannerisms blind them to her Irish accent and the fact that she has habits (such as keeping her dressing-table neat) which are more common in ladies' maids than in the ladies themselves. Similarly, one would not have expected a young lady to cut her hair off and impersonate a man, as Miss Craven does in "The Murder at Troyte's Hill". In these stories, the nature of female identity is often nebulous, being determined largely by social expectations. Loveday herself takes on many different identities during the course of the book, pretending to be, for example, governess or an amanuensis, but she remains essentially herself, a shrewd and practical, albeit impoverished, 'lady'. Unlike Mrs Paschal she never disguises herself as a servant. In fact she barely disguises herself at all, but keeps the same character, mannerisms and style of dress: all that changes is the name of her profession.
In the last of the magazine stories, "The Ghost of Fountain Lane", Loveday connects two apparently dissimilar mysteries: a stolen cheque and a child's vision of a ghost. Pirkis uses this technique quite often: in "Drawn Daggers", Loveday connects supposed threatening letters with an alleged jewel theft (neither of which are what they appear) and in "The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep" she finds a clue to a country house robbery by studying the contents of the Black bag mentioned in the title, even though there appears to be no connection between the two,
"The Ghost of Fountain Lane" portrays several women who rebel against male authority. The women who are financially dependent on the Rev Charles Turner (his wife, his mother and his servant) assert their spiritual independence by refusing to worship in his church. He is the Anglican incumbent of a country parish in Sussex, but his wife is a Catholic who "utterly ignores her husband's church and drives every Sunday to Brighton to attend mass" . His mother "who died over a year ago, was so 'low' she was almost chapel and used to drive over to Brighton to attend the Countess of Huntingdon's church" . His servant, Maria, attends a church in "a dirty little street in mid-Brighton" . (Brighton seems to accommodate every variety of religion!) As a vicar's womenfolk were expected to play an active (if unpaid) part in the life of the parish, their behaviour can be seen as a rebellion against a church which refused to ordain women yet expected them to work for nothing.
Again Loveday gains her background information from gossip, then puts the information she has gained together with her knowledge of millenarian religion to deduce that the money has gone to a religious leader who is defrauding his congregation. His hell-fire sermons have also caused the child to imagine the ghost in Fountain Lane. Loveday has a stroke of luck when one of her suspects writes a confession in her diary, which she then conveniently leaves in a summer-house as Loveday is about to enter it. Reading other people's diaries is not the behaviour expected of a 'lady', but it is exactly the kind of thing a detective would have to do in order to solve a case.
The last story, "Missing!" never appeared in the Ludgate Monthly, but was added for publication in book form. In it, Loveday investigates the disappearance of a young lady from a country house. Again, she is called in by the police, but she is somewhat cynical about their motives:
"Here's the country inspector to the backbone! He'll keep a case in his own hands so long as there's a chance of success, then, when it becomes practically hopeless, hand it over to you just to keep his own failure in countenance by yours" ( p 85).
Despite these misgivings, she takes the case and solves it. Having done so, she gently rebukes the Inspector because, having called her in, he then criticised her methods. This is one of the least convincing of the stories. In it, a mother is mistaken for her daughter, which is surprising considering that the man who makes the identification is the husband of one and the father of the other! The mother has been supposed dead for many years, and the father is about to remarry when she returns, but it transpires that no crime has been committed. The missing daughter has merely gone to seek her mother and the mother supposedly dies a natural death (although there are hints that it could have been suicide).
Pirkis's own views appear strongly in the story. Before her disappearance, Irené Golding had quarrelled with a man whom she had been expected to marry:
"One day René saw him cruelly thrashing one of his setters, and after that she cut him dead - would have nothing whatever to do with him" (p 88).
Pirkis and her husband founded the National Canine Defence League. She was heavily involved in the charity's activities and wrote articles in support of the anti-vivisection movement. "Missing!" was the last story she wrote before giving up fiction to concentrate on her charity work. As Hugh Greene puts it: "So far as writing was concerned what was lost to popular literature was gained by the anti-vivisection movement." She evidently felt that the two were mutually exclusive, a view not shared by 1990s writer Akif Pirinçci, whose Felidae (described by its English paperback publishers as The Bestselling Novel of Cats and Murder) combines detective fiction with anti-vivisection polemic. Popular fiction can be a highly effective vehicle for putting across one's views (one has only to think of Uncle Tom's Cabin), but perhaps Pirkis felt that the fiction reader should be entertained rather than preached at. Pirkis had been a successful writer of fiction, publishing fourteen novels between 1877 and 1894, but The Experiences of Loveday Brooke was her only venture into detective fiction. Michele Slung describes her earlier works as "Typically overwrought romantic melodramas, dealing with missing heirs, family skeletons, blackmail, revenge and the like" (p 70) - a good apprenticeship for writing detective stories!
© Chris Willis, January 2000
(Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated)
Primary Sources
Grant Allen: Hilda Wade (Strand Magazine, 1899-1900)
Grant Allen: Miss Cayley's Adventures (Strand Magazine, 1898-9)
Anon (attrib. Hayward): The Lady Detective: A Tale of Female Life and Adventure (Undated, publisher's name not given)
Anon (attrib. Forrester): The Female Detective (Ward Lock, edition undated)
Matthias McDonnell Bodkin: Dora Myrl: The Lady Detective ( 1900)
Charles Dickens: Bleak House (Odhams, undated, originally published in serial form 1852-3)
Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Illustrated Short Stories (Chancellor, 1985 - stories originally published 1891-1927)
Edward Ellis: Ruth the Betrayer; or The Female Spy (1863 - no publisher's name given)
Fergus Hume: Hagar of the Pawnshop (Greenhill, 1985, first published 1897)
George Macfarren & TP Prest: The String of Pearls (E Lloyd, 1850)
Baroness Orczy: Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910)
Catherine Louisa Pirkis: The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (Dover, 1986 - first published 1893)
Akif Pririnçci: Felidae (translated by Ralph Noble, Fourth Estate, 1994 - originally published in Germany by Goldmann Velag, 1989)
George Bernard Shaw: The Philanderer (in Plays Unpleasant, Penguin, c 1968)
Secondary Sources
Grant Allen: "Plain Words on the Woman Question" (Fortnightly Review, October 1 1889, pp 448-458)
Hilaire Belloc: Speech made during a debate on the Woman Suffrage Bill of 1910, reported in Votes for Women, July 15 1910, p 690.
Patricia Craig & Mary Cadogan: The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1986)
Michael Cox: Introduction to Michael Cox (ed): Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection (Oxford University Press, 1992)
Hugh Greene: Introduction to Hugh Greene (ed): The Crooked Counties: Further Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (Bodley Head, 1973)
Angela Holdsworth: Out of the Dolls' House: The Story of Women in the Twentieth Century (BBC, 1988)
W Somerset Maugham: "The Decline and Fall of the Detective Story" (in The Vagrant Mood, Heinemann, 1952)
Alan K Russell: "A Golden Era of Crime and Detection" (Introductory note to Alan K Russell (ed): Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Castle (New Jersey), 1978)
FS Schwarzbach: Dickens and the City (Athlone Press, 1979)
Michele Slung: Introduction to Catherine Louisa Pirkis: The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (Dover, 1986 - first published 1893)
Michele Slung: Introduction to Michele B Slung (ed): Crime on Her Mind: Fifteen Stories of Female Sleuths from the Victorian Era to the Forties (Michael Joseph, 1976)
Some useful links:
e-text
Articles:
Loveday
Brooke - The Lady Detective as Career Woman
The Female
Sherlock
Grant Allen's Female
Detectives
Anthology
Twelve
Women Detective Stories
an anthology of mainly 19C stories, some of which are
unobtainable elsewhere
Return to Chris Willis's home page