The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective

"This is a really interesting book, bringing together history and fiction in a way which I found fascinating. Sara Lodge explores fictional women detectives and the reality of what women were doing in the police force and beyond in the period from the 1840s onwards. She finds the overlap between the two. But what she brings out is the roles of women within detective work, outside fiction, the reality of women’s lives, particularly lower-class women who were used by the police in roles like searching women suspects, but who were also being used because women were quite difficult to see. Women could hide better in many ways; no one noticed them, so they could observe. They could gather evidence. This all becomes a social history story which looks at things like the rise of new forms of public transport. Once there are buses that people can get on, you can use those as getaway vehicles. There are issues about whether people were paying their fares or not, and women could observe. They could count how many people were on the bus. They could look at the evidence for the money that was being brought in and see if it matched. The evidence base is great because it includes the letters and the notes written by female detectives to those who were employing them. These women are overwhelmingly from the lower class. The myth of the woman detective in fiction is that she’s an upper-class woman, but the reality of women working with the police force was not that at all. Exactly. Women couldn’t be policemen, but they were wives of policemen, and they would be used by those policemen as detectives. It’s fascinating. I particularly like the combination of the fiction and the myth with the reality; it’s so well handled throughout this book. The novels with female detectives only come out after the Matrimonial Causes Act, which moved divorce to the civil courts. Suddenly, women were in a different position because of divorce being a civil matter. The first novels that open this book were written in 1864; they increased awareness of female detectives, and they also encouraged women to think that they could have that role. Fiction and reality, and the relation between them, is a very strong theme in this book. After the novels started to be published, people became aware that women could play these roles. I think that’s important. There’s a wonderful map she has of London which shows how close actual detective agencies were to the periodical publishers who published these stories of women detectives; they were actually in the same parts of London. They knew each other. The sense of geography, the sense of place, is really, really strong in this book."