(Re)inventing a genre: Legacy in women's Golden Age detective fiction

Women's detective fiction is a subject that, until recently, has itself escaped detection by the academy. It is the purpose of this project to help fill the lack by considering what cultural dynamics allowed women to gain such authority in the detective genre that they dominate its Golden Age (1920-1939). This study draws on the work of feminist literary theorists and adds its own contribution to cultural studies by reclaiming a lost piece of women's cultural history. It shows that Golden Age women writers built on earlier traditions in women's writing in order to rework the detective genre.;Chapter I focuses on Daphne du Maurier, who bridges Gothic fiction and detective fiction with works of romantic suspense, and Margery Allingham, who incorporates Female Gothic into the detective genre. Chapter II concentrates on Agatha Christie's and Mary Roberts Rinehart's use of the novel of manners, defined here as stories of courtship and marriage that unfold in an accurately detailed closed community. Chapter III explores how Dorothy L. Sayers and Patricia Wentworth engage with a more recent development in women's writing, the New Woman novel, to comment on feminist issues of their time. Chapter IV examines how P. D. James has ushered the legacy of the Golden Age into a new era. James both engages in a dialogue with her predecessors and points to the future of women's detective fiction.