ABSTRACT

After the appearance of W. S. Hayward's Revelations o f a Lady Detective and Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective in the 1860s, it was over two decades later that the female fictional detective made a reappearance in 1888 with Leonard Merrick's M r Ba^algette’s Agent. A number of historical events lay behind this renascence of the female detective which have specifically to do with the character of the final years of the decade of the 1880s. After that, events in the 1890s propelled the number of texts involving the female detective.