By Elena Bolstad
Catherine Louisa Pirkis’s The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1893) is both a historically important stepping stone in feminist literature and a blueprint for the modern-day neo-Victorian woman detective. Recently, there has been a noticeable uptick in modern media depictions of Victorian women detectives. Inspecting Loveday Brooke through a modern lens can explain why there’s a recent influx of Victorian women detectives on stage and screen and can explore to what extent these representations pay homage to Pirkis’s titular character.
Two recent examples of modern media depictions of Victorian women detectives are Rachael New’s popular television series Miss Scarlet & The Duke and Patricia Milton’s play The Victorian Ladies’ Detective Collective. The former is a fictional series that began in 2020 and centers around Eliza Scarlet, a fictional female detective in Victorian London. The latter is a murder mystery play that premiered at Central Works (Berkeley, CA) in 2019, which recounts the adventures of three women detectives as they solve a string of murders. Currently, the television series is ongoing, and the play was staged a second time in 2022. It’s evident that there’s a market for modern adaptations of the Victorian female detective—but these neo-Victorian dramatizations would not have been possible without the pioneering Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective.
The Victorian Ladies’ Detective Collective pays direct homage to Loveday Brooke. In fact, the main female detective in the play is named Loveday Fortescue. According to Milton’s description, the play is intended to “examine the obstacles facing women, then and now”[1] as it pays tribute to Victorian women detectives and interrogates the political tensions and deep-rooted patriarchal values of both Victorian London and modern-day America. The Victorian Ladies’ Detective Collective is a period piece that strives to simultaneously entertain the audience with a Victorian-era detective story and educate them on the dress, language, and societal conventions of the time. The play stays true to the Victorian woman detective in many aspects. However, its larger focus on political discourse in the Victorian and modern eras makes it more overtly modern than its television counterpart.
Miss Scarlet & The Duke, on the other hand, highlights how oppressive Victorian social values affect Miss Scarlet personally. The show doesn’t directly allude to Loveday Brooke; nevertheless, protagonist Eliza Scarlet shares some similarities with her. Chief among them is that both fictional women are the first female detectives in their fictional worlds. Like Loveday Brooke, Miss Scarlet must work alongside a male figure with ties to Scotland Yard who legitimizes her as a detective in the eyes of Victorian-era society. Loveday and Miss Scarlet exhibit similar demeanors, too. They express a calm yet unyielding demand to be treated equally and have no problem arguing with the men around them. Miss Scarlet works closely with Duke Wellington and is never afraid to disagree with him; similarly, it’s established in “The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep” that Loveday Brooke has no problem arguing with Mr. Dyer: “there were occasions on which they were wont, so to speak, to snarl at each other.”[2] Even Miss Scarlet’s choice of attire is reminiscent of Loveday—both women dress in conventional Victorian clothing. This ensures that the general public will not identify them as detectives; simultaneously, the men in their field of work and in their investigations will overlook them entirely. Miss Scarlet and Loveday are vastly underestimated as professional women, and both use this to their advantage by hiding in plain sight. However, both detectives have some visual attribute that sets them apart. For Loveday Brooke, it’s her “one noticeable trait” of “dropping her eyelids over her eyes till only a line of eyeball showed”;[3] for Miss Scarlet, it’s her pockets, which are hidden in the folds of her Victorian dresses. These pockets allow Miss Scarlet more freedom than if she were constantly holding a bag. This small detail sets Miss Scarlet apart visually, just as Loveday’s facial expressions do. The series creators at PBS frame Miss Scarlet as “the juxtaposition of . . . looking like this beautiful, refined Victorian lady, but she's also this action packed business woman.”[4] Though it isn’t specified if Miss Scarlet & The Duke drew direct inspiration from Loveday, it’s evident that the show would not have been possible without Pirkis’s pioneering work.
Why is there a sudden interest in media centering Victorian female detectives? Claire Meldrum’s “Yesterday’s Women: The Female Presence in Neo-Victorian Television Detective Programs” offers an answer. Around 2010, shows like Murdoch Mysteries, Copper, and Ripper Street first appeared, which renewed cultural interest in neo-Victorian media. The only problem is that in creating this media, the writers and shows seemed to entrench themselves in Victorian values. These shows exclusively centered on white male detectives and characters, downplaying the agency of women and people of color. Meldrum states that “one common element that (all three shows) do share—albeit to differing degrees—is the depiction of female characters as ‘other.’”[5] Women were relegated to tropes like the helpless victim or the seductive criminal. Meldrum states that the interest in Victoriana “suggests the ongoing cultural resonances between the nineteenth century and early twenty-first century,”[6] making the sexism of many neo-Victorian series a dark, cyclical irony. It makes sense, then, that just as the rise of first-wave feminism at the fin de siècle led to new genres of women’s literature, the rise of fourth-wave feminism and the Me Too movement (both of which began around 2010 and gained traction in the years after) would result in new media featuring Victorian female detectives.
Even in Victorian-era fictional works, women detectives reflected the increasingly feminist, ever-changing society around them. In Sherlock’s Sisters: The British Female Detective, 1864–1913, Joseph Kestner argues that “cultural movements, such as the emergence of the New Woman . . . are stressed in the exploits of these resourceful investigators. . . . These women detectives are proto-feminist in their demonstration of women’s independence.”[7] Loveday Brooke is a clear example of this trend, as she goes against the grain and exemplifies the New Woman in her desire to work as a detective and to be treated as equal to the men around her. Today, neo-Victorian women detectives take after Loveday, incorporating feminist ideology and continuing to challenge societal norms.
The rise in modern media depictions of Victorian women detectives on one hand reflects our fascination with Victorian culture. Yet this renewed interest is largely born from modern-day cultural and political upheaval that mirrors developments in the nineteenth century. It also reflects the feminist demand for positive representations of women in the media. New dramatic productions like Miss Scarlet & The Duke and The Victorian Ladies’ Detective Collective have Catherine Louisa Pirkis to thank for helping to popularize the Victorian woman detective genre and the feminist ideals it embodies. Loveday Brooke, though still unknown, lives on in modern media.
Notes
[1] Patricia Milton, “The Victorian Ladies’ Detective Collective.” Patricia Milton (blog), accessed February 1, 2024, https://www.patricia-milton.com.
[2] Catherine Louisa Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (New York: Dover, 2020), 5.
[3] Ibid., 4.
[4] “Designing Miss Scarlet: Q&A with the Costume Designer.” PBS Masterpiece, accessed February 1, 2024, https://www.pbs.org/.
[5] Claire Meldrum, “Yesterday’s Women: The Female Presence in Neo-Victorian Television Detective Programs.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 43, no. 4 (2015): 202.
[6] Ibid., 203.
[7] Joseph Kestner, Sherlock’s Sisters: The British Female Detective, 1864–1913 (London: Routledge, 2017).