Abstract
Catherine Crowe’s novels of working-class life, Susan Hopley: or the Adventures of a Maid Servant (1841), Men and Women: or Manorial Rights (1843), and The Story of Lilly Dawson (1847), show the impact of gendered training on women who are educated into positions of inferiority and weakness. Generically these books span the line between the Newgate novels of the 1840s and the sensation novels of the 1860s, including elements of crime, sensation, and scandal. Crowe’s radical contribution is to present detection as well as crime in the working class.
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- 1.
Later known as Susan Hopley: or the Adventures of a Maid Servant.
- 2.
Also sometimes known as The Smugglers at the Inn.
- 3.
See, for example, Charles J. Rzepka, Detective Fiction (2005); Martin Priestman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (2003); and Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley (eds), A Companion to Crime Fiction (2010), which all discuss Mary Braddon’s work at some length. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (2003) by Ronald R. Thomas also considers only Braddon as an originating female detective writer, and the first chapter in The Lady Investigates (1981) by Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan is called ‘Early Lady Detectives in England, 1861–1919.’ None of these are unusual in their assumption that female-authored detective fiction begins around 1860.
- 4.
It is worth noting that the name ‘Lucy Graham’ is used by Mary Braddon as one of the pseudonyms adopted by Lady Audley in Lady Audley’s Secret (1861). It is of course impossible to know if this ‘Lucy Graham’ was influenced by Crowe, but it is of interest.
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Heholt, R. (2018). ‘Powerful beyond all question’: Catherine Crowe’s Novels of the 1840s. In: Gavin, A., de la L. Oulton, C. (eds) British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 1. British Women’s Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940, vol 1. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78226-3_3
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