General Introduction
Alexis Easley, University of St. Thomas
Today, we take the woman detective for granted. Sleuths such as Jessica Fletcher, Olivia Benson, Enola Holmes, and Eliza Scarlett have long awed readers and viewers with their powers of deduction. But where does the female detective first appear in popular culture? Two points of origin are Andrew Forrester’s The Female Detective and William S. Hayward’s Revelations of a Female Detective, both published in 1864. However, the most important early example of the female detective was undoubtedly Catherine L. Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke. Indeed, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1893–94) was the first work of detective fiction featuring a female investigator that was written by a woman. It was serialized in an illustrated family magazine, The Ludgate Monthly, in 1893 and appeared in volume form a year later. As the essays in this scholarly edition will demonstrate, this text has much to tell us about the history of feminism, women’s literature, and the detective fiction genre.
There are two words in the title of the Loveday Brooke series that are key to understanding Pirkis’s vision as literary innovator: “experiences” and “lady.” The word “experiences” alludes to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which appeared in the Strand Magazine (rival to the Ludgate Monthly) from 1891 to December 1893. Pirkis was one of many writers who created detective serials modeled after the Sherlock Holmes series. By calling her episodes “experiences,” Pirkis alluded to Conan Doyle’s title while also suggesting that Brooke is a very different kind of detective than Holmes—that her investigative work blended into day-to-day life and involved more subtlety than bravado.
The fact that Pirkis’s title identifies Brooke as a “lady” rather than a “woman” seems, at first glance, to distance her from the overt feminism of the New Woman figure often featured in popular culture of the time period. Instead, she highlights Brooke’s ability to work skillfully within the given system as a professional detective. Her critical acumen and professional skill then become an implicit argument for women’s professional advancement—a subtle message well-suited to The Ludgate Monthly, which catered to a mainstream family audience. As Loveday Brooke disappears into a range of disguises, from amanuensis to house decorator, the term “lady” is emptied of any specific class associations, instead becoming a site of disappearance. Indeed, Brooke is defined through 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.”[1] She is instead defined simply as the vehicle of a sharp investigative gaze. Her one defining characteristic is “dropping her eyelids over her eyes till only an eyeball showed, . . . looking out at the world through a slit.”[2] She is thus both outward-looking as she considers the clues to a case and inwardly focused as she constructs these details into a coherent narrative. She embodies both sight and insight.
About the Essays in This Scholarly Edition
This edition features seventeen essays written by graduate and undergraduate students at the University of St. Thomas that examine Loveday Brooke from diverse points of view – from the serial’s place in the detective fiction genre to its engagement with debates over religion, gender, and class. We offer these essays as catalysts for future conversation, research, and writing. A good place to begin your investigation of Loveday Brooke is by reading Cheniqua Morrison’s biographical overview and Kari Aakre’s timeline of Catherine Louisa Pirkis’s life and work. By engaging in archival research, Morrison and Aakre provide fresh insight into the elusive author’s writing, activism, and social networks. Spencer Adelmann likewise provides important background on Bernard Higham’s illustrations for the serial, and Bridget Schmid offers insight on the Ludgate Magazine as the original site of publication. This context, she argues, tells us as much about the contradictory roles of women at the fin de siècle as it does about the aspirational feminism of Loveday Brooke as a popular heroine.
Many essays in this collection highlight the importance of Loveday Brooke to feminist literary and cultural history. Before 1915, there were no women on the British police force; however, during the mid-Victorian period, working-class women were employed as “searchers” of female suspects, and by the fin de siècle, women were regularly employed as private investigators. Indeed, as Katherine Bruns points out in her contribution to this edition, private detective agencies began advertising the services of female detectives as early as 1889. In this sense, Loveday Brooke was example of a new type of professional woman. As Rebekah Krotzer notes in her essay, the challenges Loveday faces as a female detective echo broader debates over the suitability of women to work in middle-class professions. Brooke demonstrates that a woman, through self-education and professional training, can excel at her chosen vocation, even if she does not receive the public attention and rewards enjoyed by her male counterparts. Jessica S. Trombley likewise interprets Brooke as pioneering figure who pursues a public career, violating gender conventions while still maintaining a sense of middle-class propriety.
Pirkis’s heroine is path-breaking in other ways as well. She unapologetically pursues her profession as a private detective, expresses no intention of marrying, and out-thinks male police detectives. As Elena Bolstad notes in her contribution to this edition, this model of female agency reflected first-wave feminist ideals and later influenced neo-Victorian representations of women detectives on the twenty-first-century stage and screen. Likewise, as Ellie Lange notes in her essay contribution, recent feminist critics have canonized Loveday Brooke as a foundational work of women’s literature. As Maddie Schutte points out, Brooke’s work as a detective also anticipates the twenty-first-century obsession with sensationalist crime and the ineffectuality of the police to prosecute everyday cases of missing and murdered women.
Many contributions to this edition highlight Loveday Brooke’s strategic approach to operating in a male-dominated field. As Pacifico Lobianco points out in his essay, Brooke uses gender restrictions to her own advantage, using the presumed invisibility of women in patriarchal society to hide in plain sight. Likewise, as Ben Morris notes in his contribution, Loveday Brooke is able to capitalize on the tendency of fellow investigators to fall prey to the deceptions of criminals due to their focus on superficial appearances. Because Loveday has a keen eye for telling detail, she is able to read objects and behaviors without prejudice and encourages the readers of detective fiction to do the same.
Loveday Brooke’s deductive reasoning mirrors the rationalism associated with the rise of the sciences in the nineteenth century. As Katherine Oswald notes in her contribution to this edition, Loveday Brooke can be seen as the direct descendent of Poe’s Auguste Dupin and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, who allude to contemporary scientific developments and model scientific detachment in their approach to unraveling criminal cases. However, as Delaney Sacia points out in her essay, Loveday Brooke is never machine-like in her approach to reasoning; she also relies on intuition and relationship-building as part of her investigative process.
Given Pirkis’s focus on ways of knowing in the Loveday Brooke series, it is not surprising that religious faith is an important theme that runs through the collection. Cecelia Schneeman, in her essay contribution, focuses on how Brooke debunks spiritualism as a quasi-religious fad in “The Ghost of Fountain Lane.” Kari Aakre likewise examines Loveday Brooke’s exposure of religious charlatans such as Henry Emmett in “The Black Bag Left on the Doorstep.” In doing so, Brooke highlights the difference between false and true forms of religion in Victorian culture.
When investigating crimes and exposing fraud, Loveday Brooke is able to move skillfully between classes, mixing with servants, detectives, and socialites. This skill is characteristic of many Victorian detectives, including Sherlock Holmes, who uses disguise to access the inside information necessary to solve crimes. What makes Loveday Brooke distinctive is her ability to assume roles within the domestic realm, positions that expose her to dangers from predatory men at the same time that they provide her with access to key evidence for solving cases. As Abby Dorland notes, Loveday’s professional work, both in and out of disguise, highlights her affinities with other women workers, who are subject to sexism and suspicion due to their intimate contact with the lives and domestic spaces of rich and powerful families. Yet as Christopher Steene notes in his analysis of “The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep,” there are limits to the text’s feminism where class relations are concerned. Even if Brooke has to some extent liberated herself from gender constrictions, she imposes gender stereotypes a non-English domestic worker, Stephanie Delacroix, thus revealing the cultural bias inherent in her own brand of Anglo-feminism.
I always tell students that it is an important moment in a writer’s career when a scholarly edition of their work first appears. It means that their writing has become instrumental to our understanding of both a genre and a time period and will reward in-depth analysis. In short, a critical edition is an invitation for students and scholars to enter into a critical conversation: to discuss the stories and their cultural, historical, and literary resonances. We invite you to debate the meanings of Loveday Brooke—to agree or disagree with what we have written and write your own analyses in response. It is this ongoing critical engagement that will allow us to understand the pervasiveness of crime media and women detectives in fiction, television, film, and social media of our own cultural moment. It also will allow Loveday Brooke to live on in our academies and our imaginations, sitting by the window in her plain black dress, eyelids lowered, ready to solve the next case.
About the Text: The Loveday Brooke series includes seven stories, six of which were published in the Ludgate Monthly from February to July 1893. The seventh story, “Missing!” appeared in the Ludgate Illustrated Magazine in November 1893, and the volume edition of the series was published by Hutchinson & Co. in March 1894. We chose the 1894 volume edition as our source text since it includes all seven stories and presumably reflects Pirkis’s final intentions as a literary artist. We have attempted to reproduce the text exactly as it appeared in the 1894 volume edition, which differs slightly in terms of word choice and punctuation from the serialized stories. Trade editions of Loveday Brooke have been published in recent years (e.g., Dover, 2020). This is the first scholarly edition available to students and general readers.
Acknowledgments: I am grateful to students in my spring 2023 Professional Editing and 2024 Victorian Detective Fiction classes at the University of St. Thomas for their dedication to this project. I am especially grateful to my assistant editors—Kari Aakre, Katherine Bruns, and Katherine Oswald—who worked closely with me after the courses had concluded to edit the critical edition into its present form. I am also thankful for the assistance of the COVE team—Dino Felluga, Rebecca Nevset, Kenneth Crowell, and Thomas Coughlin—for their technical assistance and kind encouragement throughout the editorial process.
Notes
[1] Catherine Louisa Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, ed. Michelle Slung (New York: Dover, 2020), 4
[2] Ibid.