ABSTRACT
The appearance of the female detective in English fiction during the nineteenth century was a result of a complex intersection of legal, social, moral, institutional and gendered practises. This study, Sherlock's Sisters, concentrates on the emergence of the woman detective during the period from 1888 to 1913, but the origins of the female detective in fiction are actually in the 1860s. In 2000, Birgitta Berglund observed:
The traditional pattern of representing women in fiction as objects and men as subjects has in general posed great difficulties for those (presumably female) writers who have wished to create strong and positive women protagonists. Because of the specific demands of the genre, this is even more true of detective fiction. Thus, in spite of the great number of women writers in this genre, it is a fact that the overwhelming majority of detectives in fiction have until quite recently been men. (138)
While in the aggregate it is certainly true that there are more male than female detectives, this project explores the manifestation of a number of fictional female detectives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although one woman from 1856 and two from the early 1860s indicate that even then detection was becoming part of the activity of female protagonists.
