ABSTRACT
From the 1860s to the present day, stories featuring women detectives have almost
invariably included some element of gender politics. The woman detective not only
captures the criminal, but proves herself cleverer than her male colleagues in the
process. However, detective fiction of the 1890s and 1900s betrays a noticeable
unease with this subversion of established gender roles. However successful she
is, the woman detective of the fin de siècle usually gives up detection in favour of marriage in the last chapter of her adventures, stepping firmly back into the domestic
role. Fin-de-siècle ‘lady detectives’ are almost invariably young and beautiful, and usually manage to capture a husband at the end of their escapades, ‘getting their
man’ in more ways than one. As Michele Slung puts it:
While Sherlock Holmes could return from the dead, matrimony provided a far more
enduring ending to the careers of 1890s detective-heroines. It would seem that
marriage was indeed a fate worse than death for the ‘lady detective’, at least as far as
her career was concerned. However daring and innovative her adventures, the 1890s
heroine all too often meets the same end as her predecessors in romantic fiction. The
female criminal could die single, but her opponent, the female detective, had to
prove her virtue and womanliness by marrying. Novelists writing about women
were still searching for a satisfactory alternative to the romance plot’s ‘happy
ending’ of marriage and maternity as reward for the heroine’s endeavours.
