New Book on the Victorian Female Detective

Sara Lodge‘s new book, The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective (2024), is now out from Yale University Press! With lots of juicy tidbits from Victorian periodicals, it tells the story of real nineteenth-century women who worked as detectives, alongside their fictional cousins on the Victorian page and stage. And, it can be obtained for the remarkably reasonable sum of £20 (or less, at a certain online retailer…).

As the publisher writes, the book “takes us into the murky underworld of Victorian society on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing the female detective as both an unacknowledged labourer and a feminist icon.” The Telegraph gives it five stars, calling it “a joy to read,” and The Sunday Times praises the book as “a revelation, upending assumptions about women’s supposedly marginal presence in the investigation of 19th-century crime.”

Congratulations, Sara!

About the Author

Sara Lodge is a senior lecturer at the University of St. Andrews. Her research interests include nineteenth-century popular and visual culture; writers who are also artists, musicians, natural scientists; and creative spaces such as nineteenth-century theatre and periodicals, where different forms of literary and artistic production meet and merge. Her previous books include work on the hugely popular comic author, artist, and political protest writer Thomas Hood (1799-1845); the critical reception of Jane Eyre; and the extraordinary polymath Edward Lear (1812-1888). She is also editor of Literature in Transition: The 1820s (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press) which explores diverse aspects of the decade, from early science fiction to writing about vagrancy and bodysnatching. She also contributes regularly to the Times Literary Supplement, Irish Times, Literary Review, and Washington Examiner, and other media outlets.