By Christopher Steene

Viewed from one perspective, Experiences of Loveday Brooke can be seen as the feminist counterpart to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. And it definitely accomplishes this complementarity to a certain extent, as Brooke is equally intelligent and clever as the world’s most famous detective. However, the same cannot be said for Stephanie Delcroix, the French maid initially suspected of the theft of Lady Cathrow’s jewelry at Craigen Court in “The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep.” Delcroix’s character is scrutinized by the male characters in the story, who focus on her French heritage and sexuality. Detective Brooke (and by extension, Pirkis herself) seemingly doesn’t push back or question these claims but instead endorses them. As such, I’d argue that while Loveday Brooke is an exemplary work in the field of British feminist literature, it falls short of becoming a transnational feminist work, especially given that in the 1890s the British Empire was becoming increasingly more cosmopolitan and globalized.

When we are first introduced to Stephanie Delcroix, Ebenezer Dyer explains to Brooke that she is the prime suspect in the theft of Lady Cathrow’s jewelry due to her role as the keeper of the safe, further remarking,

I must say things look very black against the girl. Her manner, too, when questioned, is         not calculated to remove suspicion. She goes from one fit of hysterics into      another;           contradicts herself nearly every time she opens her mouth, then lays it to the charge of her   ignorance out of our language; breaks into voluble French; becomes theatrical in action,             and then goes off into hysterics once more.¹ 

Dyer’s description of Delcroix’s “hysterical” reaction reflects xenophobic perceptions of French women at the time, as shown in Victorian novels, such as Dickens’s Bleak House, where Mademoiselle Hortense, another French maid, is described as having a “fierce” appearance, a “grinding manner” of speaking, and “cataleptic” fits.² These stereotypes bled into Victorian society, as the hiring of French governesses became “a complex balancing act for employers because [of] the stereotypes attached, [. . .] in particular their perceived deviancy, amorality and Catholicism.”³ Even Brooke responds to Dyer’s description of Delcroix by saying, “All that is quite François, you know,”⁴ implying that she regards Delcroix’s behavior as part of the French feminine temperament.

However, the suspicion of Delcroix’s involvement in the theft at Craigen Court extends not only to her perceived temperament but also to her private love life. As Brooke travels to Craigen Court, she bumps into Inspector Bates at Huxwell Station, who relays some insight into Delcroix’s romantic life, saying, “You see I look at it this way, Miss Brooke: all girls have lovers, I say to myself, but a pretty girl like that French maid, is bound to have double the number of lovers than the plain ones. Now, of course, the greater the number of lovers, the greater the chance there is of a criminal being found among them.”⁵ Bates’s statement has a sexual undertone, implying that while all girls have lovers, Delcroix has twice as many because of her French heritage. In Victorian society, French women were often seen as being sensual, sexually promiscuous, and immoral.⁶ As such, many Victorian political thinkers attributed France’s “national decline” to “the young Frenchmen who devoted their lives to the love of women to whom they [had] become enslaved.”⁷ French female sexuality was thus seen as a threat to domestic security.

Another foreign female character at the fin de siècle whose sexuality posed a threat to domestic security was Madame Sara, the Italian-Indian villainess of L. T. Meade’s The Sorceress of the Strand, whose real-life counterpart, Madame Rachel, “symbolize[d] threats to traditional English national identity posed by feminism, immigration and cosmopolitanism, and consumerism.”⁸ But unlike Madame Sara and Mademoiselle Hortense, Delcroix isn’t imagined so much as a solitary offender than as an accomplice. Bates continues, remarking that “this girl is only a pretty, silly thing, not an accomplished criminal, or she wouldn’t have admitted leaving open the safe door. [. . .] If we let her alone, she’ll be bolting off to join the fellow whose nest she has helped to feather.”⁹ This view wasn’t exactly new, as some French characters in Victorian novels are portrayed as “‘poor, starving and pathetic creatures.’”¹⁰ So while on one hand, Delcroix is seen as instigating crime due to her French heritage and perceived sexuality, on the other hand, she’s seen as an accessory to crime rather than being a clever mastermind.

Delcroix’s appearance and mannerisms are contrasted with those of Loveday Brooke, who is described this way:

Loveday Brooke, at this period of her career, was a little over thirty years of age, and           could be best described in a series of negations. 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; her one 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 through a slit, instead of through a window. Her      dress was invariably black, and was almost Quaker-like in its neat primness.¹¹

Pirkis goes to great lengths to describe how “plain” or “average” Brooke is, even going so far as to compare her to a Quaker because of her nondescript attire. Yet this costume proves advantageous for her occupation. As Dyer states, “The idea seems gaining ground in many quarters that in cases of mere suspicion, women detectives are more satisfactory than men, for they are less likely to attract attention.”¹² However, the mere fact that Pirkis seems to go into so much detail about Brooke’s appearance, whereas Delcroix is simply described as a “pretty, silly thing,” could be seen as Pirkis’s privileging of Anglo-white female appearance. Pirkis goes on to talk about how impeccable Brooke’s mental acuity is,¹³ whereas Delcroix “is scarcely fit to perform [her duties]” because of her “hysterics.”¹⁴ Thus, Pirkis seemingly conflates appearance with national character, with Loveday Brooke being “plain,” sharp, intelligent, and performing her duties as a female detective effectively because of her British heritage. Delcroix, despite being “pretty,” is simply seen as being hysterical, promiscuous, and unable to tend to her duties due to her French heritage.

While Loveday Brooke is (and should be) seen as a feminist venture into Victorian detective fiction, we, as scholars, should also note its shortfalls. The series does effectively present a “female Sherlock Holmes” who engages with and navigates through Victorian patriarchal society, yet she does so at the cost of foreign female characters such as Stephanie Delcroix, who might have been viewed as a transnational migrant worker rather than as a promiscuous French girl and criminal suspect. Even the ending of “The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep” seems to quickly tie up Stephanie’s story, with her passing out by a stream near Craigen Wood just before she is about to commit suicide. However, the story doesn’t even allow her this agency, explaining that her suicide attempt failed because “her courage failed her, and instead of throwing herself into the stream, she sank down, half-fainting, beside it.”¹⁵ Rather than having her decide not to commit suicide, the story instead suggests that she simply collapses from cowardice, only to be “saved” by her English lover.¹⁶

Brooke does display some sympathy for Delcroix, but this feeling is quickly overshadowed by her voicing of Victorian patriarchal views on French women. While Brooke probably figured out that Delcroix wasn’t the thief when she gave Dyer the newspaper article about the black leather bag at the beginning of the story, she doesn’t push back on Dyer’s and Bates’s claims about Delcroix’s promiscuity and “hysterical” episodes. As such, while Loveday Brooke can be seen as a British feminist work, it isn’t a transnational feminist work since it denigrates French women both in terms of sexuality and nationality/ethnicity in order to “uplift” Anglo-Victorian femininity. It is hard to know whether or not this was intentional on Pirkis’s part. Nonetheless, the story serves as an important reminder of how endemic cultural xenophobia was at the fin de siècle—and how important it is to situate our own cultural positionality in relation to others as we engage with a globalized and interconnected world.

Notes

1. Catherine Louisa Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (New York: Dover, 2020), 3.
2. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (New York: Penguin House, 1996), 663, 667.
3. Constance Bantman and Charlotte Faucher, “‘French lady seeks …’: Finding Work as a French Governess in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (1870–1914),” Women’s History Review 32, no. 3 (2023): 273.
4. Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, 3.
5. , 10.
6. Georgios Varouxakis, Victorian Political Thought on France and the French (London: Palgrave, 2002), 163.
8. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 74.
9. Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, 10–11.
10. Andreea Bălan, “French Women as The Other in Some Victorian Novels,” Translation Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views 23, no. 13 (2020): 22.
11. Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, 4.
12. , 65.
13. , 5.
14. , 15.
15. , 31.