All Program Dates
April 17, 2025 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
April 24, 2025 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
May 1, 2025 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
May 8, 2025 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
May 15, 2025 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
Registration
Tuition for this course is $250. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.
Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email rsvp@rosenbach.org.
A welcome email from the instructor three weeks before the course begins. Zoom links will be sent for the course one week before the first meeting.
This program is for those 18 and older.
Registration opens for Delancey Society members on Friday, March 14, for Rosenbach members on Friday, March 21, and for the general public on Friday, March 28. Registration opens at 12:00 p.m. ET.
Description
For modern readers, the great secret of the Victorian cultural world is that lady detective characters were among the most popular in the literature of the time. The real-life, male-only profession of the detective had been created in England in 1842, and it was not long before detectives found their way to the page. But female characters were just as—if not more—popular than their male counterparts, appearing as early as 1860 and only growing in numbers throughout the century and beyond. These stories were written by both women and male authors and, together, we’ll read about Loveday Brooke, Lady Molly, Dorcas Dene, and authors such as Baroness Emma Orczy, L.T. Meade, and Grant Allen. Even Sherlock Holmes will make an appearance!
In this course, we will explore many of the most popular of these characters and interrogate how they reflected the spectrum of Victorian attitudes about women and how they both played into and resisted conventional Victorian conceptions of (and anxieties about) female ability, acumen, psychology, and labor.
Victorian Female Detectives syllabus
Readings:
Week 1: Origins of the Lady Detective
“The Mysterious Countess” by W. Stephens Heyward from Revelations of a Lady Detective 1864
“Introduction” and “The Unraveled Mystery” by Andrew Forester from The Female Detective 1864
Week 2: The Working Lady Detective
“The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep” from The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Detective by C.L. Pirkis, 1893
“Drawn Daggers” from The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Detective by C.L. Pirkis, 1893
“The Ninescore Mystery” from Lady Molly of Scotland Yard by Baroness Emma Orczy (1910)
“The Fordwych Castle Mystery” from Lady Molly of Scotland Yard by Baroness Emma Orczy 1910
Week 3: Emotion and the Actress-Detective
“The Council of Four” and “The Helsham Mystery” from Dorcas Dene, Detective by G.R. Sims 1897
Week 4: Female Criminality
“A Scandal in Bohemia” from the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle 1893
The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories, L.T. Meade, 1904
Week 5: New Women and Lady Detectives
“Matched,” The Restaurant Neopolitan” and “Isolda,” from The Adventures of Judith Lee by Richard Marsh 1914-1917
“The Adventure of the Cantankerous Old Lady” by Grant Allen 1899
Instructor
Olivia Rutigliano is an Editor at Lit Hub and its vertical CrimeReads. She was a Contributing Editor at the film magazine Bright Wall/Dark Room, and has written essays for Vanity Fair, Vulture, Lapham’s Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Baffler, Politics/Letters, The Toast, Truly Adventurous, and elsewhere. She is a specialist in the history of mass entertainment from the late 19th through the 20th centuries and has a PhD from the departments of English/Comparative Literature and Theatre at Columbia University, where she was the Marion E. Ponsford fellow. Olivia has been a cohost for the Rosenbach’s Bibloventures, Monsters and Ghosts and Sherlock Mondays.