Lucy Sussex. Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Reviewed by Kate Watson
As part of the Palgrave Macmillan Crime Files series, Lucy Sussex's book significantly addresses a gap in existing crime and detective fiction scholarship. While Sussex has already written extensively on many of the authors and themes included and considered in her newest book, this text accessibly and informatively brings them together.
There were many female hands holding writing implements during the infancy and formative years of crime and detective fiction. Men (including Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle) have long been perceived as the progenitors of this form, but women have been present in criminous discourse from the beginning. In addition to this, women were significantly adding to the corpus of crime and detective fiction as we now know it and are thus an essential (but often neglected) part of this construction. The aim is to look for and to find the woman - Sussex writes, 'cherchez les femmes' (taken from Alexandre Dumas' 1854-7 novel Les Mohicans de Paris) - and she definitely achieves it.
Critical texts have emerged which focus on one writer and their impact upon countries and regions, such as Lois Davis Vine's edited Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities (1999). In this study, Edgar Allan Poe's literary diaspora reaches twenty-one countries and regions including Estonia, Scandinavia, China, and India but, curiously, not Australia. The key word in this context is 'reputation': perhaps had nineteenth-century women writers been accorded the same status as male authors such as Poe - or even been acknowledged - then similar texts detailing women's international influence might have materialised. It was not until 2010 that Sussex filled the previously unmarked space with her book, which specifically looks at the many women writing criminographically, and includes those in Australia.
In more recent times there has not been the need for such reconceptualisation; there has been a strong literary presence of female crime and detective writers: the Golden Age of crime fiction (1920-1940) has primarily been associated with women such as Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Other well-known contemporary female writers include (but are not limited to) P. D. James, Sara Paretsky, Patricia Cornwell, Val McDermid, and Mo Hayder. In comparison with this well-known modern feminine proliferation, the women who were writing at the inception of the crime genre were not or could not be recognized and accredited as such. This non-acknowledgement to some extent extends to present-day critical work on crime writing.
Work by women on women crime and detective writers and epochs does exist, although coverage varies. Critical attention has predominantly been on Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Anna Katharine Green, and, more recently, Metta Victoria Fuller Victor. In modern times, however, writing on individual authors has emerged; among others Alison Jaquet's 'Domesticating the Art of Detection: Ellen Wood's Johnny Ludlow Series' (2007) and Rita Bode's 'A Case for the Re-covered Writer: Harriet Prescott Spofford's Early Contributions to Detective Fiction' (2008) among others. Sussex and Stephen Knight have both written profusely on individual authors and the genre at this period.
Sussex's Women Writers and Detectives is comprehensive, setting up the beginnings of crime fiction, and then moving on to author-devoted chapters. These chapters discuss the biographical details and writing/s of authors such as Mrs Radcliffe, Caroline Clive, Frances Trollope and Catherine Crowe (UK), Mary Helena Fortune and Ellen Davitt (Australia), Metta Victoria Fuller Victor ('Seeley Regester', US), and Harriet Prescott Spofford (US), among others. Also included are the lesser-known criminous works by more well-known authors, such as Ellen (Mrs Henry) Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon (UK).
Additionally, the text has a foreword by Val McDermid and interpolates many illustrations, including portraits, scenes from narratives, title pages, police records, and caricatures. There is also a useful timeline of early true crime and its fictions. Sussex's book is an interesting read and a resourceful index for any crime/detective fiction and nineteenth-century scholar; it rightfully positions the mothers of the genre into the crime fiction canon.
Kate Watson is a Postgraduate Tutor in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University in Wales.