A Jill-of-All-Writing-Trades: Metta Victoria Fuller Victor (‘Seeley Regester’)

Abstract

We do not know who Mrs Barber was, whether young or elderly, like Miss Jane Marple, with whom she shared a fondness for knitting baby clothes. She occupied several pages only of an 1866–7 American novel, The Dead Letter, but enough information was given to hint at a New York equivalent of Mrs Paschal or Forrester’s female detective. Otherwise the lady is shadowy — as was her creator, Metta Victor (1831–87), who published the novel under the ambiguous pseudonym of Seeley Regester (Figure 8.1)

He had a person hired to watch the premises of the nurse constantly; a person who took a room next to hers in the tenement-house where she resided, apparently employed in knitting children’s fancy woolen garments, but really for the purpose of giving immediate notification should the guardian of the infant appear upon the scene … Mrs Barber, the knitting detective.

Metta Victor, The Dead Letter 96–7