By Cheniqua Morrison

Just as Arthur Conan Doyle revolutionized the world of detective fiction, Catherine Louisa Pirkis transformed conceptions of the female detective. Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke is one of the earliest appearances of a woman detective written by a female author that wholly redefines and represents the New Woman in British fiction.[1] In the 1890s, the term “New Woman” was used to refer to feminists who challenged views on women’s behavior and gender roles within Victorian society, including “marriage, motherhood and sex, and women’s rights to legal independence, to vote, to smoke, to dress rationally, to ride bicycles, to be educated, to have a career, and to be heard, seen and respected in the public and political arena.”[2] The term was also used to discriminate against progressive women who held these ideals. The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective is Pirkis’s most transformative work, powerfully marking the end of the her prolific literary career.

Catherine Louisa Pirkis née Lyne was born in Shoreditch, Middlesex—now part of east London—on October 6, 1839. She was the youngest daughter of Susan Lyne (born Susan Dixon) and Lewis Stephens Lyne, an accountant and comptroller general of the Inland Revenue.[3] She had four siblings: an older brother and sister, Frederick and Wilhelmina, and two other sisters closer in age, Rosa and Susan.[4] According to her obituary published in the October 5, 1910 issue of The Times, she was related to a prime minister of New South Wales in Australia, Sir William Lyne.[5] Though little is known of her formal education, it is assumed that Pirkis inherited her literary background from her paternal grandfather, Richard Lyne, who “as a master of Liskeard Grammar School in Cornwall had published Latin primers and grammars for [students].”[6]

Figure 1. Photograph of C. L. Pirkis (Wikipedia)

After spending her childhood years in Shoreditch, Catherine Louisa Lyne’s family relocated to Chelsea in London, as reported by an April 1861 census.[7] She married Frederick Edward Pirkis on September 19, 1872, at the age of thirty-two. Frederick served as a fleet paymaster for the Royal Navy and a year later as the chairman and honorable treasurer of the National Canine Defence League (now the Dogs’ Trust).[8] After their marriage, the Pirkises moved often and their family grew on several accounts.[9] They had two children—a daughter, Norah, born in Putney, Surrey, in 1873, and a son, Frederick, born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1875. Following Norah’s birth, Catherine’s sister Susan married Frederick’s brother George in 1874 and the families began living together. Susan died in 1878, and Catherine assumed full custody of her two children, Margaret and George, following her death.[10]

During her professional career, Catherine Pirkis participated in several movements that championed animal rights. A year after their marriage, Frederick Pirkis became involved in advocacy for anti-vivisection and dog welfare, founding and serving as chairman and treasurer of the National Canine Defence League in 1891. Subsequently, both Catherine and her daughter became involved in this project. She wrote several letters in support of animal rights on the league’s behalf, which assisted the organization’s rapid growth.[11] Pirkis also wrote for other institutions with similar objectives, including articles against anti-vivisection for the Victoria Street Society.[12] She worked closely with the society’s founder, Frances Power Cobbe, a fellow anti-vivisection activist and feminist. Cobbe highlighted their collaboration in her autobiography:

I have spoken above of all that we owe to Capt. Pirkis’ unfailing help at the Committee, even while residing far out of town; and of the zeal wherewith he and his gifted wife founded the first of our Branches, and have laboured in circulating our literature.[13]

Notably, Pirkis’s 1887 novel A Dateless Bargain was dedicated to Cobbe, “whose noble advocacy of the rights of animals has lighted a fire of indignation in England against scientific cruelty which, by the grace of God, will never be put out.”[14] Her activism for the protection of animals extended into her fiction as well, the most striking example being “Jack, a Mendicant” published in Belgravia literary magazine in 1881.[15] It follows the story of a poverty-stricken grandfather whose dog is stolen and sold to a vivisector during a period in which he also lost his wife, daughter, granddaughter, and eyesight.

Seemingly spurred by financial need following her family’s increased involvement in animal rights activism, Pirkis’s literary career began in 1877.[16] She published her first novel, Disappeared from Her Home, at the age of thirty-eight under the pen name “Mrs. Fred E. Pirkis.” The novel tells the story of a young woman who went missing from her home. Her romantic admirers must put their differences aside to uncover the mystery of her disappearance. It can be speculated that the mystery trope in this novel inspired her later foray into detective fiction, which was becoming increasingly popular at the time. As Troy Basset suggests, it “portend[ed] her creation of the popular lady detective Loveday Brooke in the 1890s.”[17] Following her second publication, she changed her penname to the genderless “C. L. Pirkis” as a response to sexism and plagiarism.[18] In a review of her novel Di Fawcett (1884), a reader referred to her as “Miss Pirkis.” Pirkis, in her response to the review, signed her name as “C. L. Pirkis (not Miss).”[19] It can be assumed that Pirkis, by choosing a genderless pen name, hoped that her work would be judged solely on its content rather than on the assumed gender of the author.

Pirkis’s publications were advertised in the Zoophilist, a weekly journal published by the Victoria Street Society. The featured works are tales and poems surrounding animal rights activism, with titles such as “Dog’s Appeal, The Fide et Amore” and “Hero and His Dog.” She occasionally contributed to the weekly journal All the Year Round, conducted by Charles Dickens, including “At the Moment of Victory” (1881), “A Dateless Bargain” (1886), and A Red Sister (1890). Some of her other works include Lady Lovelace (1885) and In a World of His Own (1878). Notably, Pirkis spotlighted female characters who challenged conventional gender roles, including those “who are beautiful and physically daring”; her works likewise often featured romance plots intermixed with details of “[crime], adventure or suspense.”[20] These depictions of femininity stand in stark contrast to her later character, Loveday Brooke, who, though daring in her chosen profession, was neither young nor beautiful by Victorian standards. By the end of her literary career, Pirkis had amassed approximately thirteen novels and several published short stories.[21] Her most popular work remains The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1894).

The Loveday Brooke stories first appeared as a monthly series in the Ludgate Monthly and, after gaining rapid popularity among readers, were republished in an 1894 volume edition.[22] The first story, “The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep,” was published in the February 1883 issue of the Ludgate, followed by “The Murder at Troyte’s Hill” in March. These and four additional stories in Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke series were published concurrently with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series in the Strand Magazine.[23] Naturally, direct competition and inevitable comparison arose between both the authors and their works. Following later publications in April and May 1893, Pirkis’s stories began gaining attention for reasons beyond their depiction of a “lady” detective. One critic noted that the Loveday Brooke stories lacked the romantic elements that Pirkis was known to have in her previous works, making them “subplots to mysteries rather than a marriage plot the protagonist follows.”[24] Interestingly, Pirkis often used the term “lady” to describe Loveday Brooke who, in Victorian society, would be viewed as a professional woman. By juxtaposing qualities of a lady’s femininity and a New Woman’s feminism, Pirkis subtly pushed against the generally accepted view of who and what a lady was, especially in terms of social class and profession. Carolyn Oulton speculates that “through portraying Loveday’s resolute independence, they [the Loveday stories] reveal the right of a woman to choose, enjoy and excel in a career and show, by example, how successfully a New Woman can live.”[25] This, perhaps, was Pirkis’s way of signifying support for the emerging New Woman and women’s suffrage without overtly advancing a feminist agenda.

Loveday Brooke embodies an astute female detective who functions successfully in a male-dominated field, oftentimes outperforming her fellow detectives. This is most evident in her observation of key details within the facts of her cases. Her employer, Mr. Dyer, often dismisses her keen insights, but they always prove to be relevant, setting Loveday ahead of him and other detectives in any given case. Loveday exercises this attention to detail markedly in the first story of the series, “The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep.” Upon finding a newspaper cutting about a bag left on a doorstep with a frivolous message, Loveday questions Mr. Dyer: “I want to know if you have seen this?” and he responds, “May I ask what you see in that silly hoax to waste your and my valuable time over?”[26] After Dyer refutes the connection between the matters at hand, Loveday proceeds to use this obscure piece of evidence to solve the case, proving her superior insight. Loveday epitomizes the New Woman, who, as Oulton notes, was “independent economically, intellectually and emotionally, [brooking] no belittlement of her achievements, but neither [trumpeting] them or [politicizing] her entitlement to a career.”[27]

On October 4, 1910, two days prior to her seventy-first birthday, C. L. Pirkis died after battling a long illness.[28] Her husband passed away two days later on her birthday. Like Loveday, Pirkis possessed “a clear, shrewd brain, unhampered by any hard-and-fast theories,” which aided her subtle, yet effective portrayal of the New Woman detective.[29] Although not as widely recognized as her contemporaries, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Catherine Louisa Pirkis's contributions to the development of the detective genre are significant. Her legacy lives on in her most memorable character, Loveday Brooke, who epitomized new feminist ideals and made them accessible to a broad audience of readers.

Notes

[1] Carolyn Oulton, ed., introduction to New Woman Fiction 1881–1899 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), 4:ix.

[2] Ibid., xv.

[3] Troy J. Bassett, “Author: Catherine Louisa Pirkis,” At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901, updated March 30, 2023, http://www.victorianresearch.org/.

[4] Oulton, New Woman Fiction, ix.

[5] “Mrs. F. E. Pirkis” [obituary], The Times, October 5, 1910, 11.

[6] Oulton, New Woman Fiction, ix.

[7] Ibid.

[8]  Bassett, “Author: Catherine Louisa Pirkis.”; “Mrs. F. E. Pirkis,” 11.

[9] Bassett, “Author: Catherine Louisa Pirkis.”

[10] Oulton, New Woman Fiction, ix.

[11] Ibid., x.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Frances Power Cobbe, “The Claims of Brutes,” Life of Frances Power Cobbe: By Herself; with Illustrations (London: Bentley, 1894) 2:311.

[14] Oulton, New Woman Fiction, x.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Adrienne E. Gavin, “‘C. L. Pirkis (Not “Miss”)’: Public Women, Private Lives, and The Experiences of Loveday, Lady Detective,” in Writing Women of the Fin de Siècle: Authors of Change, ed. Adrienne E. Gavin and Carolyn Oulton (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 141.

[17] Bassett, “Author: Catherine Louisa Pirkis.”

[18] Gavin, “C. L. Pirkis,” 141.

[19] Oulton, New Woman Fiction, xi.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Gavin, “C. L. Pirkis,” 141.

[22] Oulton, New Woman Fiction, xiii.

[23] Ibid. xv.

[24] Ibid., xix.

[25] Ibid., xxi.

[26] Catherine Louisa. Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (New York: Dover, 2020), 6, 8.

[27] Oulton, New Woman Fiction, xvi.

[28] “Mrs. F. E. Pirkis,” 11.

[29] Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, 5.