‘The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective' Review: Quarry Women

Wall Street Journal

10-04-2025

On the screen and on the page, today we are accustomed to seeing fictional representations of women detectives kicking in doors, taking down names and sleuthing out villains. From Olivia Benson tracking down perpetrators of the most heinous offenses in 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit' to Aurora Teagarden solving quaintly picturesque crimes on the Hallmark Mystery Channel, the idea of a woman as a detective in entertainment is now commonplace.
Victorian audiences were introduced to such 'lady detectives' as these characters began appearing in the popular stage shows of the time. Sara Lodge, who teaches Victorian literature and culture at the University of St. Andrews, points out in 'The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective' that these proto-Cagneys and Laceys helped prepare audiences for the arrival of the real women who began joining the police force and detective agencies in the 19th century. The theme was a blockbuster: 'In the East End theatres of London in the 1860s,' we are told, '4,000 working-class people in an evening would crowd together to see Sara Lane—actor-manager and a formidable star in her forties—playing 'The Female Detective.' ' The show was a real opportunity for an actress: She got to play several different characters and showcase her impersonation skills. The production toured Britain, then transferred to the U.S. and ran—under different titles, with different stars—for decades.
These fictional characters also established some of the tropes of the lady detective that persist to this day. She was often a gal with moxie, usually with a high education or at least relatively high social standing, and would outwit her enemies using her brains and strategy, staring down jewel thieves and seducers alike.
But Ms. Lodge tells a parallel story, of how women became detectives in the real world. Off the stage, the first female detectives were often the wives or widows of police officers. In Britain, they were frequently employed by the police in an informal or auxiliary capacity to do the jobs that male officers could not do, such as conducting body searches on female subjects. Sometimes they would be deployed to trail suspects, stake out known criminal venues, or go undercover to meet with abortionists or fortune tellers (apparently a particularly problematic type of con artist in 19th-century London). Few at the time suspected a woman of being a detective—their relative social powerlessness turned out to be a useful weapon. And so they often acquired evidence that policemen could not.