Women writers and detectives: Creating authority in British women's detective fiction, 1890--1940

This dissertation examines a number of previously overlooked or undervalued women detective fiction writers---C. L. Pirkis, Marie Connor Leighton, Baroness Orczy---and traces their relationship to later women writers who shaped the future of the genre, Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Gladys Mitchell---writers who usually begin, not conclude, studies of women's detective fiction. In particular, this dissertation focuses on the character of the female detective as a means through which women writers were able to establish their own professional authority in the detective fiction genre. It examines the narrative strategies women writers used to explore the tensions between society's underlying domestic ideology and women's entrance into the work force during this time period, as they transformed more traditional domestic roles and practices into special areas of expertise in the public sphere for their female detectives. These narrative strategies in turn helped them establish professional authority as writers by providing ways of expressing their ability and fitness to write in this particular genre and adapting it as a vehicle for women's writing. Later writers such as Christie and Sayers were able to draw upon the professional authority achieved by their female predecessors in order to engage in self-conscious explorations not only of their society but of the detective fiction genre. Christie and Sayers played with and parodied the conventions of the detective fiction genre and changed the path it would take while continuing to create narratives with cultural resonance for women.;Women writers of detective fiction explored and complicated traditional middle-class ideologies of womanhood in an attempt to expand those boundaries, as their characters act within an accustomed sphere but in an unconventional profession. Their characterization of female detectives as intelligent and logical yet often stereotypically feminine, groundbreaking yet conservative, reflects their challenge to societal norms and at the same time their inability to break from those norms completely. Through creating female detectives, women detective fiction writers were able to engage in hotly contested cultural and social debates, which in turn helped them to establish their own professional authority in the detective fiction genre.