Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction

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Author: Rosemary Erickson Johnsen

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CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST HISTORICAL CRIME FICTION

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Rosemary Erickson Johnsen


© Rosemary Erickson Johnsen, 2006. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7278–1 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7278–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: August 2006 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Lenna Drury Johnsen


CONTENTS

Preface: Hystory Girls

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1 Contemporary Women’s Historical Crime Fiction

1

2 Medieval Women in Context

21

3 Legal Violence in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America

59

4 (Re)Presenting Sherlock Holmes

83

5 Suffragette Disruptions: History, Chronology, Closure

109

6 Women and the Ever-Present Past

127

Conclusion

151

Notes

153

Works Cited

163

Index

171


PREFACE: HYSTORY GIRLS

n A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf attests to our incomplete knowledge of women in the past. After calling for a generation of women scholars, she goes on to endorse the power of fiction to bring these women to life using the new historical knowledge: “What one must do to bring [woman] to life was to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact—that she is Mrs Martin, aged thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearing a black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight of fiction either—that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually” (44). I believe that the historical subgenre of crime fiction offers women writers an ideal site for bringing to life women from the past. These writers serve an important function, reaching a broad audience with compelling, accurate portraits of women in history. Ultimately, however, what makes this knowledge of the past important is the future. What do we do with our knowledge? Are we simply looking in the rearview mirror, or are we heading somewhere? Who benefits from these characterizations, these plots, these facts about women’s pasts? It is young women and girls who give this work its real-life urgency. Feminist historical fiction has not been limited to the adult market; historical series written for girls about girls of the past, such as American Girl, Dear America, and The Royal Diaries, have become enormously popular. What makes these books important, I believe, is their portrayal of girls in various times and places. They are addressed to contemporary girls, who are still forming their ideas of what it means to be female, and they teach those girls about history as it might have been experienced by their counterparts in the past. What do today’s girls make of these books? I undertook a community service project that involved six girls, ages nine through twelve, reading books and filling out response sheets, to begin to find an answer to that question. This kind of work is not tangential to my scholarly work, but absolutely central to it, although it does require a different voice from that used elsewhere in this book. If feminism is about making change, then scholars profit by asking how our tools benefit tomorrow’s women. In the next chapter, I emphasize feminist scholar Cora Kaplan’s

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description of links between feminist academic work and possible futures. In speaking of late 1980s women’s historical fiction, she argues that what seems to be happening is that these novels are using all that feminist historiography and cultural critique actually as a basis for a new kind of historical novel, one that uses all the research that’s come out. But feminist critics aren’t reading them. Or if they’re reading it’s not with the same attention or the same centrality any more. It’s as if the project about cultural practice and imaginative practice, and the practice of criticism have somehow got cut off from each other. (22)

The historical crime writers in this study reward close attention, and my small project with the girls reading historical fiction written for them sought to understand where all of this historical fiction about women and girls might be leading. It was also a means for me to participate actively, in my own community, in a nonscholarly forum that put these issues in front of a nonspecialist audience. Serious attention should be paid to feminist historical crime fiction—and not just by academics. Readers who enjoy these books can be asked to think about the scholarship that buttresses the entertaining plots and appealing characterizations. The project I designed asked the girls to read books of their choice independently, followed by an informal discussion at my house, and then a public presentation in March 2003. Sponsored by the Grand Rapids, Michigan, branch of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), our event was part of an area-wide women’s history month celebration called “Legacy.” The Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council coordinates Legacy every three years, and local organizations sponsor events that are listed on the calendar and promoted by the Women’s History Council. As a member of the local AAUW branch, I proposed the “hystory girls” project to the board as a more interactive replacement for our traditional contribution to Legacy, a session with a paid speaker. Once they approved the concept, I was responsible for designing, recruiting, and coordinating the project. Most of my work was geared toward the girls and their mothers, but I also produced materials that offered AAUW branch members suggestions for how to get involved, including information about the books and suggestions for how they might approach these texts as adults. The girls’ enthusiasm was contagious, and they made a great presentation, several of them wearing historically themed costumes. Although the project was community service, I did not want to waste the opportunity on general responses and subjective holistic judgments. I wanted a clear analytical framework and a way to focus the girls’ responses


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on key issues. Because I needed a framework for analysis of these books that my readers could use, I consulted English Education colleagues. Based on the materials they provided, I constructed a response sheet and some basic guidelines for my readers. This is what I told them in an introductory letter: According to researchers, there are certain things that good historical fiction should do, and the questions on the response form are designed to help us see if you think these historical novels for girls actually do these things. 1. History should not be sugarcoated. If bad things happened and people shared destructive beliefs, these should not be excluded from the book or misrepresented. 2. Historical information should be accurate. 3. The historical period must come to life. 4. The main character should reveal a realistic young-person’s point of view on historical events. 5. Historical detail is given appropriate attention—not too much, not too little.

We worked primarily with large series like the American Girl books, though some also read nonseries titles. The existence of these series (as opposed to one-off historical novels) has a significance of its own, and the girls talked about that significance (more on that below). The series are prominent in libraries and bookstores, and individual titles vary slightly in quality. The history–mysteries for slightly older readers got especially high marks from my group, and the third entry in that series, The Night Flyers, won the 2000 Edgar award for best juvenile crime title. The project was thus a hybrid one: what was originally conceived as a community service project turned out to be an extension of this book. A more formal research project would have included a larger group of readers and a less partisan approach: because we were sponsored by AAUW, appearing as part of women’s history month celebrations, and the girls were hand-picked by me, my findings are necessarily preliminary. Five of the girls were in fourth grade and one was in the seventh. Three of my six readers are in gifted and talented programs, and two more are highscoring language arts students. Although some of what I expected to find was corroborated by my readers, however, there were also some surprises. Based on my own research and the experience of using some of the adult books featured in this study in university classes, I already knew that feminist historiography and crime fiction together can make a powerful, widely accessible statement about women of the past. Working with the girls on this project gave me more insight into how and why that is so.

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What the Girls Said My readers analyzed their responses to these texts, looking at issues such as audience, images of girls in the past, and the transmission of historical knowledge. I would like to characterize three of the most significant responses that were offered consistently. First, a good plot is the most important aspect of these novels. I was surprised initially at how much plot dictated their overall judgment of each book. One of my readers reported that she disliked a Dear America title because it didn’t have a strong enough plot: “did not really bring me into the book just told me about her life no real story.” Suspense, or lack thereof, was mentioned repeatedly by the girls. Their perception of how much detail was warranted was directly related to how engrossing they found the plot; clearly, a compelling story creates opportunities for the author to include a lot more circumstantial detail and historical information. The history–mysteries were singled out for praise on this issue. As long as the female protagonist is spunky and of a suitable age, the particular details of her personality did not seem to be that important. One respondent complained that in the Royal Diary title featuring Eleanor of Aquitaine that Eleanor is fourteen to fifteen years old, so readers don’t “see her childhood.” Surprisingly, other figures in the books, and some plot events, could strike the girls more forcibly than the depiction of the protagonist. For example, one reader said what she liked least about Secrets on 26th Street was “that Susan’s dad died” even though she noted that his death occurred before the events of the novel begin. Coal Miner’s Bride prompted another reader to say what she liked least about it was “Stanley, the man Anetka goes to America to marry.” That respondent was also made uncomfortable by “how mean the white people were to black people” in another book. The girls are sensitive readers, and while they recognize the value of not sugar-coating history, they also regret its painful consequences. The girl who read Coal Miner’s Bride was astonished when one of the older AAUW members spoke at our presentation about her experience reading the book in preparation for our session; she spoke movingly, based on her own childhood experiences, of the accuracy of the environment depicted in that book. The exchange between these two readers benefitted both of them: the young reader was pleased to have such direct corroboration that the painful aspects of the story were authentic (and not gratuitous), and the older reader was pleased to see experiences like her own made part of the larger story of girls in history, one that could be read by the twelve-year-old girl in front of her. It is crucial for these young readers that the main character be a girl, preferably between the ages of eight and thirteen. All of my readers spoke


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frankly about this preference. In addition to the implication that stories about boys are less interesting because boys are themselves uninteresting creatures who only care about sports and computer games (a belief that is partly a function of their age), they had a logical explanation for this preference. Because these stories are set in a different time and place from our own, they said, it would be too much of a stretch to imagine ourselves in the protagonist’s place if we also had to cross the gender barrier. I really enjoyed their calm belief in that fact, having spent my own childhood reading as if I were a boy, a phenomenon recorded and analyzed by feminist scholars like Judith Fetterley and Carolyn Heilbrun. The connections they perceived between themselves and the protagonists of these books were also delightful, both to me and to the audience at our AAUW presentation. One of the topics on the response sheet asked them for their opinion of the protagonist, including their evaluation of her believability and the identification of qualities they saw in her that they also see in girls today. Here is a partial list of the shared qualities they named: adventurous, likes to be with her family, kind, friendly, fiery, hardworking, determined, caring, likes reading and learning, brave, humorous [sic], likes to have fun, tries to do things right, resourceful. One girl commented that the protagonist in Number the Stars was “totally like girls today but set in a scarier time”; that same reader said of a protagonist in another book that she “was very smart just like girls today.” The similarities that they identified were all positive; they see these strong traits as forming a link between girls of the past and their own confident selves. Finally, it was clear that they feel that they are learning history in concrete, social, material ways, which they value. The Felicity American Girl books, for example, pleased the girls because they show the impact of the American Revolution on an entire family. At our informal session, the girls agreed with one another that this was a lot more interesting than what they have learned thus far in school about the American Revolution, which seems to focus on politics and warfare. When textbooks do give social material, it is often presented in a way these girls perceive as “cheesy,” while the historical fiction permits a more natural in-depth presentation. The suffrage-era book A Time for Courage, part of the Dear America series, struck one respondent as giving a compelling picture of the effects of their activism on suffrage agitators and their families. She liked the “details about the lives of the women who were active in the movement—things like picket lines and conditions in jail really show you how hard it was for these women and their families.” That book and the suffrage-era history–mystery, Secrets on 26th Street, both focus on the daughter of an activist woman; the relationship between mother and daughter is explored in fascinating ways.

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Not only do they feel that they learn valuable information from these books, but virtually all of the response sheets also record the readers’ appreciation for their own twenty-first century opportunities. One topic the sheets asked them to address was cultural comparisons, and I took care to word it neutrally: “What are some of the ways girls’ lives were better or worse in this culture compared to ours?” There was no sentiment expressed for the past; they saw hard work, limited opportunity, and discrimination, and they saw how these things crossed many different social categories (not just gender). My Own Observations While my readers are mostly high academic achievers, I was still surprised by their sophisticated commentary and their broad background in historical fiction. Some of what went on at the informal discussion—in the basement with pizza—was astonishing, and the written response sheets do not fully capture their breadth of knowledge. All but one of them had considerable background in this kind of reading; one girl would mention an American Girl character like Felicity, and they would all start talking in detail about the Felicity stories. They were able to characterize the strengths and weaknesses of different series, and they understood the marketing power of a series. As enthusiastic readers, they appreciate the efficiency of a series: if you discover a series title you like, you know there are several others you will probably like as well. They were unanimous that these books should be made part of their classroom work, partly because they think boys need more awareness of women’s history. While accuracy is always central to historical fiction, for young readers it is crucial because they may lack the background knowledge to discern (and possibly forgive) anachronistic attitudes, technology, and objects. Ironically, the highly regarded historical author Karen Cushman—her awards include the Newbery medal—gets bad marks from medievalists for anachronisms like a potato and more generally for presenting protagonists with twentieth-century attitudes inside medieval costumes. The historical material presented in the series books can help combat inaccuracies, but the issue remains an important one. Even in the historical material, some errors can be found: in A Time for Courage, for example, a photograph of Emmeline Pankhurst has a caption implying it is of an American woman being arrested in Washington, DC. I also found that the demands for credibility are different in books for young readers. While Ruth Hoberman’s description of “the pressures of plausibility” (4) is particularly relevant for feminist writers, like those examined in this book, who are trying to introduce factually correct information


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that may be surprising to the reader, the issue shifts for younger readers. The challenge then comes not so much from readers’ assumptions about a particular historical period; rather, it is the distance from their own experience that encourages authors to shape material into forms that they know will be credible to their anticipated audience. If it is too strange in the context of their own lives, they may reject it. In this area, too, the factual information included in most of the series volumes is key. A good example of this is found in A Time for Courage, where the Historical Note begins by directly addressing the relation between the story the reader has just finished and the historical record, moving on to tell a story that, while true, would seem implausible to today’s girls: Although Kat’s mother, Eleanor Bowen, is a fictional character, she followed in the footsteps of some very real people who began fighting for women’s rights in the middle of the nineteenth century—women such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton . . . These women fought not only for the ballot but also against other terrible inequalities that perhaps are unimaginable to young readers today. For example, it was unlawful for a woman to sue for damages. In 1873, a woman in Massachusetts slipped on the ice and injured herself. She could not sue, but her husband was awarded thirteen hundred dollars as compensation for his loss of her ability to work. (Lasky 194; emphasis in the original)

This kind of framing is essential, and the inclusion of the true story adds another dimension to the young readers’ appreciation of the fictional hardships depicted in the novel itself. Finally, I was struck by the girls’ desire for feminist content that is put in positive terms, recording limitations but showing girls and women rising above them. I have already described how much the girls valued the presence of a female protagonist in these books. Listening to them talk, I believe that it is because they want to see the connections between themselves and these girls of the past that the feminist content must produce positive messages. As one of the girls wrote about Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, “I think that the main character was very brave and I think that girls today are brave too.” They are interested in learning about the restrictions societies have historically placed on girls and women—and some of them could see the restrictions lingering in contemporary society—but the message needs to be upbeat or they will put it aside. The Oregon trail book, for example, put off a couple of my readers because it seemed to focus relentlessly on the deprivations and hardships faced by the protagonist. I see their insistence on positive messages not as a sign that they are shrinking from anything unpleasant; rather, it is because they are adamant about

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moving forward. They want to learn about girls in the past in order to take that knowledge with them into their own futures. * * * The achievements of the feminist historical crime writers included in my study are remarkable, and it is a phenomenon that really only took off in the early 1990s, just after those feminist historical novels mentioned by Cora Kaplan. The project with the “hystory girls,” undertaken at a fairly late stage in the researching of this book, was exhilarating. The mere presence of these books, about girls, for girls, is pleasing to me, but the responses of the girls to them were truly inspirational. The girls were curious about my spelling of our title—Hystory Girls—but when I explained it to them, they liked the idea behind the spelling. They are twenty-firstcentury girls, and learning about girls of the past just makes them more confident about their own futures. That is the purpose of feminist historical fiction; these are not just books, but interventions in female lives. A book cannot be written without incurring many debts of gratitude. First, special thanks to my “hystory girls” for their enthusiasm and insight: Hannah Schneider, Maggie Schlick, Laura Santoski, Katie Lachance, Lenna Johnsen, and Dominique Aouad. The Grand Rapids branch of AAUW sponsored our reading project, and has provided an interested audience as I worked on the book. I am also grateful to the students in my Women and Literature classes at Michigan State University and my Brit Lit I students at Grand Valley State University who demonstrated the power of women’s history–mystery to educate and inspire, convincing me that my work should become a book. For practical assistance and timely encouragement along the way, I would like to thank Ann Astell, Ann Haskell, Stacy Hoult, Joe Natoli, and Lois Tyson. Martha Reineke’s cogent reading of the entire manuscript at a late stage was crucial to its final form. Nearly everyone working in history–mystery owes a debt to Jo Ellyn Clarey for her tireless organizing and generous introductions, and I am no exception: one of her calls for papers got me started in earnest on this project, and she has provided many opportunities for me as I worked on it. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared in Contagion; Andrew McKenna helped me write about feminist history–mystery for a nonfeminist audience, and the current editor of Contagion graciously gave permission for me to include some of that material here. Over the several years it has taken me to write this book, the National Coalition of Independent Scholars (www.ncis.org) has provided continuity during a series of visiting academic appointments.


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My family has supported me throughout my work on this project. Becoming the mother of a daughter transformed my life and my thinking, and Lenna’s intelligence, beauty, and generous spirit served as a daily reminder of why women’s history matters as I worked on this book; I have dedicated it to her. My son Arnold’s sharp wit and cheerful nature often restored my spirits. The first reader of my scholarly writing has always been my husband, Bill: not only was he precisely the coach, critic, and travel agent I needed to write this book, I know he will see me through the next one.


CHAPTER 1 CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S HISTORICAL CRIME FICTION

n Reading in Bed, her inaugural lecture as Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature, Hermione Lee notes that “the history of reading contains within it a conflict which recurs over and over again, in different formulations, between what one might call vertical and horizontal reading: the first regulated, supervised, orderly, canonical, and productive, the second unlicensed, private, leisurely, disreputable, promiscuous, and anarchic. The contrast between public and private, licensed and unlicensed, social and solitary reading has never been straightforward” (3). She invokes the image of Virginia Woolf, whom she describes as “one of the great advocates of disreputable reading, junk reading, serendipitous reading, dream-reading, reading while looking out of the window, reading while running a high fever” (19). Lee’s images suggest one explanation for the power of the historical crime writers under consideration here: their crime novels belong to the worlds of both horizontal and vertical reading. With the pleasures of the crime novel working in concert with the knowledge base of the authors’ historical research, a great deal is achieved. A scholarly study of how this subgenre achieves its success draws well-deserved attention to the significant achievements of feminist historical crime writers since 1990. What does “feminist” mean in this book? As my preface reveals, in these books written in the present and set in the past, I see a strong concern for the future. Feminist historiography searches out information about women in the past; it uncovers hidden material, records sometimes surprising facts, and offers new ways of seeing women. Although written as genre fictions, the novels studied here add to the historical record and offer readers new ways of perceiving history. Naturally allied to the material detail of the history is a focus on agency: readers of these novels are asked to think about women’s agency in the past and to consider the possibilities for enacting

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FEMINIST HISTORICAL CRIME FICTION

their own power to create change. This is a worthy feminist project. Evaluating some of the tools of feminist theory, Lois McNay argues, as recently as 2003, that “a more rounded conception of agency is crucial to explaining both how women have acted autonomously in the past despite constricting social sanctions and also how they may act now in the context of complex processes of gender restructuring” (141).1 The feminist historical crime novels I analyze here provide a powerful conjunction of women past, present, and future. They embody, in a popular narrative form, what Seyla Benhabib has described as “the feminist commitment to women’s agency and sense of selfhood, to the reappropriation of women’s own history in the name of an emancipated future, and to the exercise of radical social criticism which uncovers gender ‘in all its endless variety and monotonous similarity’ ” (229). Much recent scholarship on crime fiction has valorized the so-called metaphysical crime novel. The women’s history–mystery I examine in this book can be seen as a countermovement to the masculinist development these critics admire; in fact, I see these particular works as a deliberate reclaiming of ground that is feminist–materialist. The distinctions I would make between “metaphysical” crime fiction (written primarily by men and valued by postmodernism) and feminist history–mystery (written primarily by women and of interest to materialist feminism) mirror divisions between the theories that take them up.2 These historical crime novels constitute a site where feminist historiography can link women’s writing and scholarly practice to political awareness. I use the word political here—and throughout this book—as Cora Kaplan defines it: not “narrowly, but in the sense that what is being taught connects up with what you might be doing now around those questions, that it is being taught in relation to a dynamic of what you might do or produce or be in some future conjuncture, rather than just as an object of study” (21, emphasis in the original). Indeed, teaching these works in university classes makes evident how they inspire and enable agency; not only do readers learn “new” history, but they are also inspired to keep looking for more. Truth and accuracy are vital issues for the history–mystery subgenre, particularly for those writers—like the ones included in this book—whose work demands agency. The first step, of course, is to call for active reading, rather than passive absorption, but these books go further and call for activity after the book is read. The best writers provide an incentive for learning more and offer starting points for interested readers to continue seeking knowledge. Sometimes this can take the form of bibliographies or author’s notes, but some of the most engaging opportunities for pursuing leads are provided through devices like quotations or saint’s lives used as epigraphs, characters who may—or may not—be historical, references to intriguing

WOMEN’S HISTORICAL CRIME FICTION

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social or legal codes, even passing references to food, clothes, or home furnishings. This is one reason why accuracy is so important: if the reader has little faith in the author’s standards of research and representation, she will not bother to pursue any of those leads. As Robyn Warhol notes of the Victorian novels she analyzes in Gendered Interventions, “a realist novel that does attempt to alter the world it strives to represent requires a special relation between reader and text. For readers to act upon the novels’ suggestions, they would have to take the texts seriously and think of the fictions as somehow true” (xii). The potential of these historical crime novels to effect change depends upon their fusion of history, feminism, and the appeal of a well-crafted mystery; as they succeed with readers, they provoke these readers to become active agents. Critical Contexts One of the significant consequences of the “second wave” of feminism has been another revolution in literature and historical study. A new historiography has inspired another wave of literature that reconsiders and reclaims women’s place in history, regenerating the kind of interest in women’s history created by earlier writers such as Virginia Woolf. Many highly regarded women novelists have adopted historical settings for this work. For example, consider as a group the women writers who have won the Booker Prize since the late 1980s.3 All of these Booker-winning novels take up historical settings and, even more significantly, take up the subject of history itself: how it is defined, created, and perceived. This new wave of historically aware literature by women is distinguished by a high profile and commercial success; although literary and sophisticated in their historiography, these texts are neither arcane nor inaccessible to a general readership. Furthermore, though the works of women writers have long dominated the crime fiction shelves (if not the scholarly studies), some of the most prominent names in the last twenty years have chosen historical settings for their mysteries: Ellis Peters, Anne Perry, and Elizabeth Peters, for example. These three writers have a significant public presence. Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael books have been made into a television series; revelations about Anne Perry’s criminal history as Juliet Hulme made headlines in 1994; and Lingua Franca examined Elizabeth Peters’s crime fiction in its “Inside Publishing” feature, describing her best-selling Amelia Peabody series as “a painless primer on Egyptology’s history” and quoting academics who laud her accuracy (Tepper 20). These indications of widespread interest, along with the presence of many lesser-known crime writers who have chosen historical settings, point to the current importance of this subgenre for writers, readers, and critics.

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Some of the most important of these historical mystery series reflect a clearly feminist orientation: these books feature female investigators and pay careful attention to the political and socioeconomic circumstances of women in their chosen historical settings. Through these methods, the writers of such novels change the way readers perceive the past. Women crime writers are setting their narratives across a broad historical spectrum, with special attention to periods that can be seen as pivotal to women’s lives. Gillian Linscott’s investigator, Nell Bray, is a suffragette, an activist member of the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union); Miriam Grace Monfredo’s first novel is set in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, and the first women’s rights convention is woven into the crime plot. These authors are writing women into history by imagining those ignored by the standard histories, creating credible thoughts, actions, and circumstances for such previously invisible people. The most serious of these writers are also creating access to important historical information for an extensive audience. Although these writers’ series are commercially successful, for the most part they are not the New York Times Bestseller List authors like Anne Perry; the demands of their research agenda preclude the prodigious output of a Perry or a Peters. Significantly, many of these writers have postgraduate or professional credentials, and they conduct painstaking research for their books. Sharan Newman, for example, has advanced graduate training in medieval studies and provides lengthy bibliographies for interested readers; Miriam Grace Monfredo is a professional librarian and her books include the sort of archival acknowledgments and bibliographical information readers would usually expect to find in biographies or other nonfictional works. Gillian Linscott has been a successful journalist for many years, and she brings BBC-honed research skills to her Nell Bray series of crime novels. In sum, the crime novels of these writers provide historical information that is accessible to both expert and general readers. My study demonstrates how some of today’s crime novelists use their research to create a powerful, yet widely accessible, statement about women in history, while refining an important crime fiction subgenre. Writing these books is a complicated venture as it requires adherence to the requirements of two genres—crime fiction and historical fiction— as well as attention to women’s issues. The historical material is particularly challenging as the authors must search records for information about people whose lives often went unrecorded, especially those circumstances and conditions of their daily life so essential to the fabric of any novel. Then they face a daunting hurdle in creating credibility because their historical material may not fit easily with their readers’ preconceptions about this particular time and place. Ruth Hoberman, in her study


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of women’s historical fiction set in ancient Greece and Rome, describes how “the pressures of plausibility” can force authors to “reinforce their readers’ assumptions about the past” (4). The writers included in my study must maintain a careful balance between meeting readers’ preconceptions and conveying the results of their research that may well conflict with those preconceptions. They wrestle with what A. S. Byatt has characterized as “exactness and invention, the borderlines between fiction and history, and the relations of both to criticism” (5). Mark C. Carnes, approaching this issue from the historian’s perspective, sees the potential conflict even more definitely. In his view, historical fiction is “inescapably a contradiction in terms: a nonfictional fiction; a factual fantasy; a truthful deception” (14). In spite of the difficulties of the task, historical crime novels have flourished since the early 1990s, and a book-length critical analysis is both timely and appropriate. The reasons for writers to choose this particular subgenre are compelling enough to make the challenges worthwhile. We see this when we ask why these writers are putting their carefully researched material into historical mysteries rather than (say) biography or social history. If one of their goals is the dissemination of historical information, there are many good reasons to put their work in such a widely read genre. Carolyn Steedman notes that “one popular legacy of the work that has been done in the field [of women’s history] is an altered sense of the historical meaning and importance of female insignificance. The absence of women from conventional historical accounts, discussion of the absence (and discussion of the real archival difficulties that lie in the way of presenting their lives in a historical context) are, at the same time, a massive assertion of what lies hidden” (104; emphasis in the original). The writers featured in this book take on both parts of the job; their novels do assert the absence of women from conventional history, and they are also a means of bringing to life some of that “hidden” reality. Their historical fiction becomes a literary record produced after the fact, a credible addition to the available body of information. Evidence of Monfredo’s success in this arena is the National Women’s History Project’s (NWHP) endorsement of the Glynis Tryon books. Sold as a set by the NWHP, Monfredo’s novels are the only adult literary texts they offer (their focus is on educational materials, reference works, biographies, and other kinds of women’s history). Finally, the combination of historical fiction with a feminist perspective provides both an incentive for and a direction for further historical research on the reader’s part. These writers enjoy a broad readership and because they have created such successful feminist historical crime series, there are many readers a great deal better informed and interested in learning even more about women’s history.

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There has been a growing awareness of historical fiction not as escapist literature but as a critical, inquiring literature. As a review article on historical fiction put it, the recent “swarm” of literary historical novels “all use the past . . . to illuminate what has shaped our lives, what we in the present have inherited from history” (Weeks 1, emphasis in the original). A. S. Byatt’s published essays on the subject reveal her sophisticated thinking about the relationships between history and literature, and play to an audience interested not just in historical novels as texts but also in the complex relationships between “fact” and “fiction.” Fiction has become a recognized way of understanding history better, and its role in generating interest in historical reading and research seems clear. To cite just one example, Ben Shephard, in A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century, grudgingly acknowledges not only the role of Pat Barker’s trilogy of historical novels in generating interest in the topic, but also her skill in reading historical texts. The feminist potential of historical fiction is likewise evident. When Monika Fludernik argues that “whereas literary didacticism concerns itself with the individual, with the complexities of moral decisions, or with (philosophically relevant) essentials of humanity in their typical manifestations, historical knowledge of necessity tends to concentrate on political rather than personal morality, on patterns of decision-making and on elusive historical truths. Not that these aspects need be incompatible” (25, emphasis in the original), she implies the form that might be taken by a politically interested combination of the two sometimes-didactic modes of literature and history. The feminist historical crime writers I am interested in here prove the potential for compatibility; in their work, the individual and the systemic are brought together in meaningful ways. Patricia Duncker puts the relationship in these terms: “historians . . . seldom describe the inner psychic lives of the people they address. This is the novelist’s territory. We both read the past, play it like a score, but in different registers” (51). Through the inclusion of those “inner psychic lives,” historical novelists can inspire readers to do more than passively absorb the text. In the last five years, several book-length studies and essay collections have been published in the general field of crime fiction. Historical crime fiction is included in recent studies that consider the whole field of crime fiction, such as Hans Bertens and Theo D’haen’s Contemporary American Crime Fiction (Palgrave, 2001) and Stephen Knight’s Crime Fiction 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (Palgrave, 2004). However, while these publications attest to the importance of historical crime fiction in the contemporary market, none of them focuses extensively on that subgenre. Knight’s ambitious study of the crime fiction genre, which outlines a logical structure for the genre’s development and is both wide ranging and accurate


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in its references, ought to be required reading for any scholar working in the field.4 Although Knight mentions historical crime fiction as a growing contemporary subgenre, however, he relegates it to a few pages in a section entitled “Other Continuities” and does not distinguish between the serious work being done and the authors producing “lite” history–mystery. Indeed, for Knight, the subgenre is a form of “internal tourism,” one that meets “a recurring need among many readers for a fully escapist, even light-weight, treatment of crimes” (144, 145). While most of the writers he mentions are not publishing rigorously researched, seriously historical crime novels, Sharan Newman (misspelled Sharon by Knight) certainly is. I would argue that, broadly speaking, the dominant recent approaches to crime fiction emphasize traditionally masculine forms and disregard, in theory and in practice, women’s historical crime fiction. Sally Munt’s Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel (Routledge, 1994) does not include any historical crime writers, perhaps in part because her study was published fairly early in the history–mystery boom. Much of the critical attention devoted to crime fiction has concentrated on the private eye subgenre. Even the feminist criticism of the last twenty years has by and large retained that narrow focus. Kathleen Gregory Klein has been an influential figure in the field, especially through her book The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre (Illinois, 1988). Although her approach is openly feminist, she has chosen to define the genre by one of its most masculine subcategories: the hardboiled. She studies female private eye figures as a way of assessing the genre’s suitability for feminist purposes and finds feminist “reform” of the genre to be impossible: “the genre must be completely remade, stripped of some of its most characteristic elements” (221). Klein’s work has been extended through recent studies like Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones’s Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition (California, 1999), and Linda Mizejewski’s Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2004). Studies such as these offer valuable feminist readings of crime fiction, but their focus is limited to Klein’s territory, the hardboiled. In addition to the hardboiled, there has been engagement with other— equally patriarchal—subgenres. Knight identifies two subgenres as “the cutting edge” in contemporary crime fiction: the violence-centered, serialkiller type and the postmodern crime novel. In a 1996 review essay assessing the record of feminist criticism of detective fiction, Patricia Merivale asserts that the only important contemporary development is “the current postmodernizing of the genre into ‘metaphysical’ (allegorical) detective fiction” (693). Feminist critics are strictly on the sidelines, Merivale suggests, because “the ‘new game’ in town is the metaphysical (postmodern) detective story, and I don’t yet see any female players offering to play

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hardball with those boys” (700, emphasis in the original). Her phrasing betrays an incongruous deference to the strictly male preserve she seeks to authenticate as the only “real” crime fiction. She does not name any of these authors in her review, although the authors included in her own coedited collection of essays, Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (Pennsylvania, 1999), suggest who she has in mind: the “major figures” in her “Suggestions for Further Reading” include Paul Auster, Thomas Pynchon, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, among others, but not a single woman writer. Not only is the subgenre she valorizes unattractive to many mainstream crime fiction readers, but it can also be seen as a re-masculinizing of the genre. Although many critics deny or ignore the genre’s potential for feminist writers, there are some who argue that the genre is less conservative than it is often assumed to be. Merja Makinen’s Feminist Popular Fiction (Palgrave, 2001) notes that “there are two standard assumptions about detective fiction, that it is a male-based genre because of its ratiocinating puzzle-solving element, and that it is an inherently conservative genre because its resolution involves the reinstatement of a hierarchical status quo. Both assumptions are challenged by a detailed look at the history of the genre” (92). Of Klein, Makinen notes that “Klein’s ‘conspiracy theory’ model of popular culture prevents her theorising detective fiction as potentially transformable” (4). Carolyn Heilbrun, one of the most distinguished figures in U.S. feminist scholarship, was also Amanda Cross, author of the feminist mystery series featuring Kate Fansler. Heilbrun observed that it’s a safe guess that every detective novelist has been asked why he or she writes detective stories and not “real” novels. There are many answers, but I think an important one has never been stated flat out: that with the momentum of a mystery and the trajectory of a good story with a solution, the author is left free to dabble in a little profound revolutionary thought. In my opinion, detective fiction, often called formula fiction, has almost alone and with astonishing success challenged the oldest formulas of all. (“Gender and Detective Fiction” 7)

Heilbrun is referring to gender formulas, patriarchal assumptions about woman’s roles in society; by identifying crime fiction as the most successful at challenging these formulas, she offers a powerful reason for a serious writer to write serious mysteries. The girls’ reading project described in my preface bears out her sense of the possibilities created through by an engrossing mystery plot. Rosalind Coward and Linda Semple, drawing on almost a hundred years of crime fiction written by women, confirm this judgment. Crime fiction is often assumed to be socially conservative, they


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note, but that assumption is sometimes incorrect. The very nature of crime fiction, they argue, makes it suitable for women writers concerned about the place of women in society: “Women’s concerns, far from being alien to this genre, are often the very stuff of the crime novel—violence, sexual violence, conflict between individuals and authority, and conflict between men and women. That such potentially radical concerns have often been at the heart of the form should therefore lead to no surprise that the form can be used specifically for radical ends” (54). Or, as Mijezewski observes in the context of television crime drama: “It’s not simply that this show rigged crime plots to highlight gender. What Cagney & Lacey made clear is that every type of criminal case involves a gender issue because it involves women and men, through [sic] traditional crime dramas usually gloss over the impact of gender rather than calling attention to it” (83, emphasis in the original). I believe that central feminist issues, including violence against women and questions of sociocultural value (what would someone kill for?), are built right into the conventions of the crime genre. The increasingly strong voice of feminist scholars of the genre gives some indications as to how we might begin to analyze the ways in which these crime writers use their research, refine the conventions of their chosen genres, and create a powerful but widely accessible statement about women in history. Thus, as my study demonstrates, feminist historical crime writers have found a way to do what Klein deemed impossible: to “reform” the sometimes-conservative tendencies of the genre without sacrificing those elements valued by mystery readers. Peter Brooks, in comparing crime plots to dream analysis, implies an interesting relation between theme and plot in the genre: “As in detective narratives . . . the dream’s metaphors, and the dream as metaphor, must be plotted out as metonymies. The thematic material suggested by the dream, and the associations that the dreamer is able to articulate in reviewing the dream, can only begin to make sense when narrativized, ordered as a sequence of events” (274). Because the writers in this study take up serious themes, the best of them find ways to narrativize those themes as crime plots. Monfredo and Linscott are particularly successful at narrativizing feminist themes in well-conceived crime plots. So many things can be treated politically, polemically even, through the natural opportunities provided by the mystery genre’s emphasis on plotting, and on the detail-oriented method of reading it demands. I would argue that in paying attention to trivia dismissed by others, even classic male sleuths like Sherlock Holmes take readers into a feminist-friendly realm. I am not saying that Doyle (or Holmes) provides a feminist emphasis to these investigations; I am arguing that in attending to small details not

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considered important by the authorized (police) investigators, these sleuths are engaging in activities often reserved for women. (The woman-centric reality of this method will become sharply defined in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles, discussed below.) Knight makes a similar point in the context of the woman-created male sleuth, Hercule Poirot: “Poirot’s claim on rational and psychological mastery is a Holmes-like front for a simpler method; but here it is not male clerical-style observation, but the types of knowledge that are classically, and stereotypically, female. The Styles mystery is largely solved because Poirot can understand why a set of paper spills on a mantelpiece have been disarranged. . . . Before Miss Marple is invented Poirot already represents a heightened version of female domestic knowledge as a weapon against fictional disorder” (91). Because these feminine, domestic clues are read in order to solve a crime they attain an importance, even an authority, they would not otherwise have. While the achievements of the writers included in this study are based upon many different strategies, as will be demonstrated in their respective chapters, here I would like to present one in-depth example of the role played by feminine clue-reading. In Through a Gold Eagle, Miriam Grace Monfredo’s fourth Glynis Tryon novel, readers are given elaborate information about mid-nineteenth-century women’s fashions. The polemical thrust of Monfredo’s viewpoint, as well as her thoroughly researched knowledge, can be seen in the following passage: Currently, the wide full skirt regarded as fashionable could conceal almost anything, from bowleggedness to pregnancy, if the wearer’s torso was constricted by a long-boned corset laced tightly enough to severely compress the waist. This might result in a well-endowed woman billowing above and below like plump feather pillows, but it was stylish! Walking, even with mincing steps, was difficult, bending over virtually impossible. This tortuous practice could, and often did, result in serious damage to a woman’s health; impaired respiration, digestion, and circulation, collapsed lungs, and the prolapsed uterus for which the devices of treatment—such as insertion of wood, ivory, or glass pessaries to support the womb—rivaled those of the Spanish Inquisitors. But this was of no particular concern to those who set the trends. And too often, Glynis had to admit, middle-class women followed like sheep rather than risk the embarrassment that might result from appearing ignorant of, or too poor to afford, the fashionable. Neva, who saw firsthand the consequences of this slavish obedience to fashion, railed against it long and loud. “I’ve come to believe,” she’d said on many an occasion, “that women are their own worst enemies.” But Glynis didn’t think this was bred in female bones. It had been spread, she thought, like a disease by the institutions— churches, professions, universities—which had much to gain, and to retain, by keeping women penned in their clothing, in their homes, in their place. Like so many docile infected sheep. (133–34)


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This is not the only instance where fashion is mentioned in the novel, but it is the most extensive passage on the subject. Glynis’s reflections here are prompted by the sight of Emma’s dress, cleverly designed to mimic the appearance of the fashionable dresses without requiring the boned, tightly laced corset. Glynis’s point of view in this passage is consistent with what readers know of her, and through that point of view Monfredo can link restrictive clothing with other kinds of restrictions placed upon women in this society. The opinion of Dr. Neva Cardoza adds another kind of support to these remarks about fashion. But what keeps such material from being intrusive or irrelevant? Its connection to the story Monfredo is telling. Glynis’s niece, Emma, is a skilled seamstress; we learn through her about state-of-the-art sewing machines, about the inequitable remuneration received by sewing men and women, and about fashions. She seeks, and eventually obtains, employment at the Seneca Falls dressmaker’s shop. These threads are woven into the plot in several ways. Emma’s installment payment purchase of the Singer sewing machine leads to legal action. The dressmaker, Fleur Coddington, is part of the counterfeiting circle, and her shop is revealed to be a hub for distributing counterfeit banknotes. And her shop’s role is no coincidence, but directly connected to the nature of women’s fashions: Emma discovers the banknotes sewn into cloak linings, skirt flounces, and petticoat casings (274–76). Emma makes her discovery because of her professional knowledge of clothes—these garments do not hang correctly or look right to her trained eye—but presumably to the less expert, the bulk and complexity of women’s fashions make them an ideal hiding place for fake banknotes. The information about women’s fashions, just like the ostensibly “more important” information about banking laws, is accurate and it is woven carefully into Monfredo’s story. This is in marked contrast to the attention paid to fashion by romance novels; as Jan Radway notes, “the clothes described in these passages almost never figure significantly in the developing action. Instead, the plot is momentarily, often awkwardly delayed” by these descriptions (193). Radway argues that the attention paid to fashion is intended to underscore the message that women—characters and readers—share “a universal interest in clothes” (193). Though not all crime novels turn Monfredo’s kind of attention to clothes, the writers included in this book only include clothes in order to illustrate a point—historical, political, or criminal—and they take care to do so accurately. Precursors Bertens and D’haen’s survey of contemporary American crime fiction includes a chapter on the historical subgenre, describing “the veritable

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explosion of crime fiction placed in a historical setting” as “one of the more remarkable developments in crime writing since 1980” (146). The year 1980 is their starting point because of Eco’s The Name of the Rose, but they note that “a contributing factor to the sudden visibility of historical crime writing may well have been the initially far more modest success of British writer Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael” whose first case was published in 1977 (147). Although the historical subgenre has come to prominence within the last twenty-five years, the feminist writers taking advantage of its potential to “touch upon past as well as present injustices, their backgrounds and explanations” (Bertens and D’haen 147) did not start from scratch. Peters provides a valuable starting point for women writing historical crime fiction, as her monk—like Hercule Poirot before him— attends to the kind of detail usually associated with women. But there are other significant precursors for these feminist authors. René Girard’s method of reading texts of persecution, described in The Scapegoat, is pertinent here. Girard suggests how we might read texts of persecution written by naive persecutors in ways that identify with the persecuted and gather the information unintentionally supplied by the authors: “I call those persecutors naive who are still convinced that they are right and who are not so mistrustful as to cover up or censor the fundamental characteristics of their persecution. Such characteristics are either clearly apparent in the text and are directly revealing or they remain hidden and reveal indirectly” (8). These texts of persecution bear an important relation to narratives of crime, even though they lack verisimilitude for contemporary readers. The historical crime writers I am studying, focusing as they do on disenfranchised groups, depend for their verisimilitude on their ability to read historical sources and literary predecessors in the way Girard describes. One of the key features of nonfictional texts about crime is that ordinary lives are recorded in material, detailed ways. In Victorian Murderesses: A True History of Thirteen Respectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes, Mary Hartman testifies to some of the ways in which criminal trials lift the lid on home lives otherwise unrecorded and invisible. Hartman notes repeatedly that the records of these women’s lives are more complete than they are for their less-murderous peers because their “lives were thrown open to public scrutiny when they became involved with the processes of the law” (3). In particular, women who murder their husbands or other family members focus attention on domestic circumstances that would otherwise be ignored or misrepresented. Two cases from the midnineteenth century, according to Hartman, “have the advantage of taking two middle-class households by surprise, and each provides some glimpses of the goings-on behind the normally closed parlor and nursery doors” (97).


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The link to crime detection and legal prosecution heightens the demand for accuracy and completeness even beyond the verisimilitude of history: nothing can be taken for granted, everything must be spelled out. In consequence, these records can provide research material for later writers. It is not just the privacy conscious Victorians who left informative crime-related documents. Davis’s Fiction in the Archives relies on letters of remission written by those seeking pardon from the king for admitted crimes in sixteenth-century France. Her explanation of their value to researchers is worth quoting at some length: Why then choose the letters of remission? Because they are one of the best sources of relatively uninterrupted narrative from the lips of the lower orders (and indeed from others, too) in sixteenth-century France. Letters and memoirs from peasants and artisans are rare. Marriage contracts, wills, and other contracts are plentiful and tell us much about the actions, plans, and sensibilities of men and women who could not even sign their names at the bottom, but the documents themselves are dominated by notarial sequences and formulae. Letters of remission were also collaborative efforts, as we will see, but they gave much greater scope to the person to whom the notary was listening. (5)

In common with Hartman’s criminal Victorians, in these letters we hear from people we normally would not. The issue of voice is significant as well; although modified by the forms of the process, these sixteenth-century supplicants are enabled to speak for themselves to an unusual degree. Looking into the circumstantial details of women’s lives of the past, as my crime writers must do, the kinds of information requisitioned under the extreme circumstances of capital crime are invaluable. Information can be gathered and then represented within a crime novel: for feminist writers, the existing crime records are a useful source of specific knowledge and the crime plot offers potential to structure a compelling narrative directing attention to that specific knowledge. Texts of criminal cases and judicial proceedings cast a different light on what would be inexcusable trivia in a standard historical narrative. Minor details can influence the outcome of a case, and apparently insignificant details can be meaningful to later readers. This makes crime writing a fertile field for feminist readers and researchers because they are accustomed to reading meaning in circumstantial detail. For example, Hartman notes that “Florence Bravo [complained] that Charles opened her mail. Such apparent trivia did matter to the women, but it also stood for deeper discontents which they found difficult or impossible to express directly” (296). One could go even further and argue that his opening of her mail is one more manifestation of his determination—and his “right”—to control all aspects

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of his wife’s daily life. Other reminders of women’s powerlessness appear incidentally, as in the Penguin Famous Trials series’ presentation of Neville Heath’s crimes. Shortly before she was brutally attacked, raped, and murdered by Heath in 1946, a “tired, pale, and distressed” Doreen Marshall ordered a taxi at Heath’s hotel, presumably to get away from him. But what happened was that “Heath cancelled this [taxi order], saying Miss Marshall would walk home” (Hodge 58). Apparently no one questioned his right to countermand her order, with fatal consequences for Marshall. This kind of detail often suggests larger patterns; Hartman reminds us that “the circumstances which prompted their actions, the stratagems they employed, and the public responses to their reported behavior display a pattern which suggests that, far from committing a set of isolated acts, the women may all have been responding to situations which to some degree were built into the lives of their more ordinary middle-class peers” (2). We are given clues, literally, about what women’s lives were like. And these kinds of clues can lead naturally to larger, more significant issues, making the crime genre a promising field for social critique. One of Davis’s cases suggests how this process works: “a seigneur of Anjou, dining with his curé and other priests on the feast of the Annunciation 1547, ended up killing an intruder who denied that one needed to fast at Lent. Though the quarrel here concerned matters of personal honor—Who knew better the eating habits of the court? Was the intruder as much an ‘homme de bien’ as the seigneur?—it moved to the wider question of the honor of the Church and what it was to be a good Christian” (40). From personal issues, the case moves naturally to more global issues. The paradoxical privileging of the trivial is dramatized effectively in a literary text, Susan Glaspell’s 1916 play Trifles, in which women discover the solution to a crime by reading domestic clues ignored by their husbands. The central character of the play, Minnie Wright, who has murdered her abusive husband, never appears; she is in jail, awaiting trial. The novels of several of the authors in my book embody the same truth-finding mechanism as Trifles; while the official (male) resources are directed ineffectually, the domestic (female) resources unearth the relevant information. What the men in Trifles are looking for is a motive, something to show a jury conclusively that Mrs. Wright killed her husband; the women are left in the kitchen while the men are upstairs viewing the scene of the crime. The contrast between the “trifles,” the “little things” (264, 269) the women are concerned with, and the “evidence,” the “awfully important things” (269) the men look at, is accepted by all of the characters, male and female alike. The women hide behind the supposed insignificance of women’s activities when they decide to protect Mrs. Wright and suppress the evidence of her motive for murder. The sheriff’s wife, Mrs. Peters, who


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is “married to the law” (277) in the eyes of the men, exclaims, “My, it’s a good thing the men couldn’t hear us. Wouldn’t they just laugh! Getting all stirred up over a little thing like a—dead canary. As if that could have anything to do with—with—wouldn’t they laugh!” (276; emphasis in the original). In fact, both women know fully well that the dead bird, along with the other domestic “trifles” they have recognized in the kitchen, provides the solution sought by the men, who appear periodically in the kitchen to mock “the ladies.” Glaspell’s play, significantly, is based on a real murder, one that Glaspell covered as a young journalist in Davenport, Iowa. A farmer’s wife for thirty-three years, mother of his nine children, apparently murdered him in his bed in December 1900, in outstate Iowa. While clearly working from the facts of the Hossack murder, Glaspell has altered certain features of the case: the mother of nine becomes childless (and thus more completely isolated) and the murder method has been changed from axe blows to the head to strangulation, thus making the murder of the abusive husband mirror his destruction of the wife’s pet bird. These changes are of good dramatic value and provide an example of what Stephen Knight describes in fictionalized representations of true crime: “crime fiction, it is clear, needs to be fictional to achieve proper resolutions” (27). Linda Ben-Zvi charts Glaspell’s increasingly sympathetic journalistic coverage of the accused woman in the 1900 murder. She also notes some of the crucial transformations wrought by Glaspell in her later play thematically: the women who attended the trial but had no voice in its proceedings were given “the opportunity to be heard” in Trifles whereas the words and actions of the male characters are “staged to show ineffectuality and incompetence” (33, 36). The play achieves these things brilliantly, but Barbara Ozieblo notes in her recent biography of Glaspell some of the limits to the play’s daring representation of women’s actions: Although the women rebel against traditional mores, they are all effectively silenced. . . . Her two neighbors dare to protect her by hiding the evidence their shared experiences lead them to uncover, but they are clearly not going to oppose man’s justice by actively speaking out for Minnie. Accordingly, although Glaspell condones the breaking of codes of behavior that strangle women, she does not alienate the men who make them up. Trifles represents an awakening to the dilemmas of womanhood, but it offers no solutions. (84)

Ozieblo makes a crucial distinction here. Most audiences experience the play as a triumph for the women; in teaching the play, I have noticed that both male and female students tend to “presume the wife’s right to take violent action in the face of the violence done to her,” as Ben-Zvi puts it (35).

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But it is important to remember that although the women defy social norms, they are in no position to take positive action. It is an all-male jury that will be asked to convict Minnie Wright and, like the jury that convicted real-life Margaret Hossack, they will most likely do so, uninfluenced by society’s women. Glaspell’s biography suggests several reasons why the critique might go this far, and no further. For example, Ozieblo writes that in her Iowa journalism, “like Elizabeth Cady Stanton before her, Glaspell railed against the skirts in which patriarchy dressed women,” but the terms of her discussion of Glaspell’s early journalism suggest an importance difference. Ozieblo catalogs Glaspell’s “wink and nod,” “tongue in cheek,” “whimsical” presentation of these topics, and notes that “Glaspell never openly argues for suffrage or any other candescent woman’s issue” (21), making her very different indeed from Cady Stanton. Her own desires colored her presentation of marriage, though she had “been aware of the trap that marriage could become for an intelligent woman. But she had firmly believed that love would gild the cage, transforming confinement into rapture” (Ozieblo 268). In Glaspell’s writing, then, the personal does not necessarily transform into the political. One way in which contemporary history–mystery writers expand upon the political potential provided by Trifles is through their availability and appeal to a broad readership. Glaspell, highly regarded in her time, has been restored to public awareness, but only in specific contexts. “Only recently,” her biographer notes, “have academics and theater lovers begun to recognize her name and anthologies found space for her play Trifles” (Ozieblo 1). As of this writing, Trifles is in print as a supplement to a collection of Glaspell’s short stories published by a university press and in a volume of her plays that was published in 1987 by another university press; the availability of these books has fluctuated, and both are expensive for general readers. The play is also widely anthologized in texts for college classrooms; these large and expensive tomes are unlikely to make their way into the hands of many nonuniversity readers or post-university readers (those who went to college more than fifteen to twenty years ago will not have had Trifles in their anthologies). Trifles is a brilliant precursor for contemporary feminist crime writing, and I have seen its power in university classrooms. But whatever its inherent feminist potential, it cannot hope to find the kind of broad readership enjoyed by the history–mystery writers in this study: available in affordable mass-market paperbacks, stocked by public libraries, and connected to the marketing engine of the crime genre, these books are widely read and enjoyed. Trifles is an important precursor for the contemporary history–mystery writers of my project primarily for the method of interpretation it models.


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The contemporary authors must perform work similar to that undertaken by the women in Glaspell’s play while their husbands are looking elsewhere. Glaspell’s play offers a method for coping with the limitations of historical sources and precedents, demonstrating a way of reading clues. The contemporary authors search the (male) historical record for information about those it holds in contempt or disregards, and this literary predecessor provides tools with which to examine an incomplete record, one which omits the “trivia” of female existence. Like the women Glaspell portrays in Trifles, these authors must work in the gaps of their historical sources, striving for accuracy but sometimes required to hypothesize the circumstantial details necessary for their projects; they interpret, imagine, imitate. The Following Chapters My book advances the existing critical discussion of women’s crime fiction by examining the feminist interventions of these historical mystery writers. As I sketched out above, the existing scholarship has not served to value feminist historical crime fiction, nor does any existing branch of current literary criticism illuminate the aims, impact, or significance of this emerging subgenre. Discussing what these writers accomplish through their work leads inevitably to considerations of how they achieve those results, so narrative theory provides a significant part of my study’s conceptual framework, and there is a growing body of feminist narrative theory and critical practice to provide scholarly context for my project.5 Following out the promise of narrative theory to a highly technical formalist analysis of these historical crime novels would be valuable, but it is not my intention to write that book. Rather, I would like to do justice to the political thrust of those novels included here. Peter Brooks found that “narratological models are excessively static and limiting” for his purposes in Reading for the Plot because he was “more concerned with how narratives work on us, as readers, to create models of understanding, and with why we need and want such shaping orders” (xiii). Brooks “loos[ened] the grip of formalism” (xiv) by turning to psychoanalysis. For my purposes here, feminist scholarship provides the means to attend to what is most significant in these novels, particularly their politically charged voice. I rely on Susan Sniader Lanser’s Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice throughout my study, along with Natalie Zemon Davis’s work with feminist historiography and narrative, especially Fiction in the Archives. Lanser’s emphasis on female authority in narrative is particularly relevant. She argues that extra-representational acts, which she summarizes

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as “reflections, judgments, generalizations about the world ‘beyond’ the fiction, direct addresses to the narratee, comments on the narrative process, allusions to other writers and texts” (16–17), make greater claims to authority than fictions that represent only the fictional tale. Such acts, she notes, “expand the sphere of fictional authority to ‘nonfictional’ referents and allow the writer to engage, from ‘within’ the fiction, in a culture’s literary, social, and intellectual debates” (17). The historical crime novelists studied here seek authority for their work on several fronts: their historical presentation must be credible, their crime plots orthodox yet clever, and their feminist message persuasive. Several of my chapters focus on specific extra-representational features of their narratives. Robyn Warhol’s analysis of direct interventions in texts recognizes their power to “make something happen” (197). “When the engaging narrator speaks to a ‘you’ that stands for the actual reader,” she writes in her final chapter, “the text produces a real event, an exchange of ideas that the novelist hopes will result in real consequences” (203). I believe that the writers in the present study also have designs on their readers, although direct address within the narrative is not one of their tools. While Lanser is a continuing presence, individual chapters also focus on additional concepts or studies that illuminate particular aspects of each author’s work and her contribution to activating her readers. So, for example, in chapter 2 I use Gérard Genette’s structuring of epigraphs in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation to analyze Sharan Newman’s use of epigraphic material, and in chapter 5 I show how Gillian Linscott’s Nell Bray series provides a meaningful response to Kathleen Gregory Klein’s model of crime fiction closure in The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. I have borrowed specific constructs from several scholars—Genette, Rabinowitz, Todorov—to apply in contexts where these offer illumination. Feminist scholars such as Carolyn Heilbrun and Patricia Duncker appear in a similar fashion. The innovative nature of this study has required me to stake out new ground; existing author-specific criticism and theoretical models have been insufficient. Like Lois Bueler in The Tested Woman Plot, I found myself to be working on “a project for which I have no model” (vii). Some authors required a more thematic approach, while others called for analysis of clearly delineated narrative strategies. Like Lanser in Fictions of Authority, however, I am writing “for a general scholarly readership rather than for specialists in narratology” (23). The historical crime series of seven writers provide the main focus for the following chapters. These principal writers were selected based on several criteria. First, their books succeed as novels: these are well-written books with carefully constructed crime plots and effective historical ambiance.


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They also reflect sophisticated, even innovative, narrative strategies. Many of them have won major awards. Further, these texts reflect high-caliber research, and most provide the means for readers to continue researching independently (through bibliographies, archival acknowledgments, and the like). Finally, they are feminist, not only in general orientation, but also in making a contribution to women’s history by filling in some of the gaps in our collective knowledge and providing a feminist impulse toward change.6 One essential sign of commitment to feminism is a female investigator; while male sleuths can draw attention to women’s issues, part of the historical project is to show women in action during these periods. Although the historical settings vary, each author provides her own answer to the question, “why feminist historical crime fiction?” Shaping an answer for each writer, one that focuses on her narrative strategies, unifies the individual chapters of this book. I noted earlier that some of the most successful series are set in periods pivotal to women’s lives and status in society. Following the lead of Monfredo and Newman in their short story collections Crime Through Time, I have ordered the chapters in a chronological order of setting. This leads to some gaps in time, and to some chronological overlap between chapters 4 and 5. There are time periods not covered in depth in my study that have potential for this kind of feminist project; I am not implying that these periods lack significance, but simply that they lack crime series representation that meets the criteria outlined above. For example, the Elizabethan period was a time of great change and shifting roles for women; though there are several popular series set during that time, however, these revolve around the queen and her court, not ordinary people. (One of these series features Elizabeth herself as a sleuth, and yet another presents an illegitimate half-sister of the queen as investigator.) The field of historical crime fiction is very large these days and many readers of this book will not have read all of the authors I am focusing on. This is not intended to be a survey of the subgenre; I am reading selected series, and go into considerable detail with some of the individual titles. Because their use of crime plots is an essential aspect of the achievements of these writers, I do reveal solutions in my discussions. Stories of crime—real, fictionalized, or fictional—combine the power of narrative, often suspenseful narrative, and a focus on circumstantial detail. The authors studied here take advantage of these opportunities and speak authoritatively to their readers about women in history. They perform openly what Lanser calls “self-authorization”: “I assume that regardless of any woman writer’s ambivalence toward authoritative institutions and ideologies, the act of writing a novel and seeking to publish it . . . is implicitly a quest for discursive authority: a quest to be

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heard, respected, and believed, a hope of influence. I assume, that is, that every writer who published a novel wants it to be authoritative for her readers” (7). These writers have made themselves authorities on women in their chosen time period, and they shape their narratives to entertain, enlighten, and inspire agency. The remaining chapters will focus on how they do so.

CHAPTER 2 MEDIEVAL WOMEN IN CONTEXT

The most powerful oblique effect of the epigraph is perhaps due simply to its presence, whatever the epigraph itself may be: this is the epigraph-effect. Gérard Genette, Paratexts It should be understood that the Middle Ages were not a wilfully ignorant time. Rather than wallowing in darkness, waiting for the Renaissance to happen, centuries of concentrated effort went into developing tools both of the mind and hand and in accumulating knowledge. Margaret Frazer, The Squire’s Tale Many people think of history as mighty figures, epic events, and statistics. . . . Novelists and dramatists paint in the detail of the period, set the mighty in motion with imagined dialogue, and create the less than mighty characters missing in the historical records. Candace Robb, The Lady Chapel Like most of us, Catherine and Edgar are not the movers and shakers, but the moved and shaken. Sharan Newman, The Difficult Saint

he medieval period has been an important presence in historical crime series ever since Ellis Peters, widely regarded as the originator of the contemporary market in historical crime fiction, placed her Benedictine monk, Brother Cadfael, in twelfth-century Shrewsbury. Depictions of the period, however, sometimes tend to be sentimental. Sharan Newman’s Catherine LeVendeur series consistently combines credible historical information, a strong mystery, and a feminist imperative. Some of the work done by Margaret Frazer and Candace Robb belongs alongside Newman’s, and they play a supporting role in this chapter. For Women on the Margins, Natalie Zemon Davis deliberately selected “city women, the

T

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daughters of merchants and artisans—of commoners” (3) because the lives of such women are particularly instructive for those who seek to learn about women of the past. (For similar reasons, Davis chose a Jew, a Catholic, and a Protestant to make up her trio.) Frazer, Robb, and Newman follow through on this logic in their fictional representations of medieval women: their female sleuths are, respectively, a nun, an apothecary (trained by her late husband), and a merchant’s daughter. Their social standing does permit the inclusion of important, and often surprising, information about the circumstances of medieval women’s lives. After an introductory section surveying and discussing some of the characteristics of Newman’s, Frazer’s, and Robb’s series, I focus on three of Newman’s narrative strategies, each paratextual in some way. The first of these is a categorization of her use of epigraphs, followed by consideration of her use of real historical figures, most notably Heloise and Peter Abelard. The final section analyzes Newman’s use of the pilgrimage as a narrative structure in Strong as Death; drawing on literary precedents from both high culture and popular culture, in this novel she creates a compelling fusion of entertainment, analysis, and instruction. Three Medieval Series The remoteness of the medieval settings places extra burdens on these writers, particularly in relation to the feminism of the novels. Accuracy must not be sacrificed, or the feminist motivation will not be well served, but the medieval world’s circumscribed roles for women can make it difficult to generate any feminist material at all. It is particularly difficult to provide positive feminist material, and variations on the theme of women’s mistreatment are insufficient to inspire agency. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is a near-perfect illustration of the problem; although it is not designed as a feminist text, it embodies some of the main elements of feminist critique. Eco’s monks reveal their misogyny continually, and the world they have constructed for themselves is one free of women. The only actual woman who makes it into the text is “the girl,” and she personifies the kind of animal nature these men ascribe to women. Adso’s sexual encounter with her is predictable, as is her unfortunate end. And yet, while Eco’s novel so successfully conveys the medieval religious world without women, it offers readers only the recognition of women’s demeaning exclusion from everything that is considered to be of value. Beyond noting their absence, we can learn nothing about their circumstances. Any feminist treatment of the period must surmount this difficulty. Both Robb and Newman are outspoken in their belief that women enjoyed certain opportunities or powers that were later denied them, but it is not easy to show

MEDIEVAL WOMEN IN CONTEXT

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that without descending into sentimentality or romanticism. Newman succeeds in incorporating authentic feminist content through well-chosen thematic topics ( justice and religious belief ) and features of medieval life (reading, judicial administration, and religious practice). Feminist momentum can be particularly difficult to create because of the distance between the cultures within the novels and that inhabited by the reader. Peter Rabinowitz makes some important points about the links between didactic staying power and audience distance from the world within a novel. Initially he puts this in terms of the distance between authorial and narrative audiences: “It would seem that the greater the distance between authorial and narrative audiences (the less realistic the novel in our new definition), the less impact a moral lesson learned by the narrative audience is likely to have on the authorial audience” (132). While this construction might seem to rule out contemporary historical fiction—since after all, we belong to the original authorial audience—Rabinowitz’s use of H. G. Wells’s utopias can be paralleled to twenty-first-century readers of historical fictions set in the Middle Ages. If not precisely “fantastic” in the sense of Wells’s “scientific absurdities,” the distance is large enough, and the general reader’s knowledge patchy enough, to validate the comparison. If that distance makes it easy for readers to leave behind the instructional elements after reading the book, then it becomes vitally important that the authors of feminist crime fiction with medieval settings make it realistic, bridge the divide convincingly. In reading books that bring together authorial and narrative audiences, Rabinowitz argues, it is “more likely that the lessons learned as narrative audience will stick for the authorial audience too—and, unless the authorial audience is very distant from the actual audience, for the actual audience as well” (133). This means that even though the most unrealistic of medieval series can entertain their readers, only those that achieve credibility can truly be feminist. Those that focus on more ordinary people—not queens and courtesans—have an extra hurdle in readers’ ignorance but, paradoxically, a much greater chance of creating a feminist impulse if they can provide enough information, naturally linked to plot and character, to overcome that gap. Newman, Robb, and Frazer all date their novels explicitly and precisely; often they are building around a known structure of historical fact.1 One of the strengths of the best medieval series is their use of real historical figures and events. In Newman, historical figures (Peter Abelard, Heloise, William of Cumin) and real conflicts (the struggle for control of Durham, Abelard’s trial for heresy, waves of persecution of the Jews) serve the dual purposes of educating readers and contextualizing the investigations of Catherine and Edgar. Robb’s The Lady Chapel not only takes up King Edward III and John Thoresby, Archbishop of York, but also brings to readers’ notice the

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figure of Alice Perrers, the king’s mistress. The manipulations of the English wool trade and the mystery plays are made an integral part of the plot. Their settings are varied in time and place, however. Newman’s novels are set in the middle of the twelfth century; her first Catherine LeVendeur novel opens in September 1139, and the time sequence remains tight, with the events of one novel beginning mere months after the end of those in the preceding novel. Candace Robb’s novels are set approximately two hundred years later; her sleuth, Owen Archer, works for John Thoresby, Archbishop of York from 1352 to 1373. The Sister Frevisse series is set later still, during the reign of Henry VI. The first title in the series, The Novice’s Tale (1992), takes place in the autumn of 1431; by the tenth book, The Squire’s Tale (2000), the action has moved forward only eleven years (the young King Henry VI is now twenty rather than nine, a characteristically deft strategy of Frazer’s for linking her stories to readers’ historical knowledge). The Widow’s Tale (2005), the fourteenth book in the series, is set in 1449. To speak of these novelists as a group, then, may seem problematic. Yet, traditional timelines of English literature and history to some extent support their grouping; all three settings are northern European, after the Norman Conquest, yet before the Renaissance inaugurated the early modern period.2 Furthermore, the authors themselves consistently appear at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo each year, suggesting a shared foundation of interests. Robb’s series features a male sleuth, and although Archer’s wife, Lucie Wilton, provides opportunities for Robb to explore women’s issues in the period, their initial meeting is clichéd and Lucie always plays a supporting, not a leading, role in the novels. The feminist content provided tends to be incidental, rather than central, to the plots and the narrative’s focalization. Robb’s series, however, is the only one of the three that provided authorial material on research that provides resources for interested readers from the first series entry. Some of the clearest feminist content comes through supporting players like Magda, the riverwoman, whose unofficial medical practice puts her in contact with a variety of social, physical, and emotional ills, but platitudes regarding women’s roles abound. Robb’s subtopics have a tendency to be twenty-first century as well: a novel like The Lady Chapel (1994) provides a good example of this, with its discussion of battered wives, abortion-procuring clerics, and homosexuality. The subplot of Paul Scorby and the wife he abuses, Anna Ridley Scorby, is handled in a contemporary, rather than medieval, framework of values. Scorby, an immoral man in all aspects of his life, is the only character who accepts his right to beat his wife. Everyone else is aghast, from Anna’s parents, to the priest, to Owen Archer. Archer goes farthest in saying that as her husband, Scorby “ ‘has a right to see her’ ” (59) after she is laid up in bed


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after his most recent beating. These attitudes seem anachronistic and they highlight one of the difficulties of working in the medieval period. Attitudes that were commonly accepted at the time can only be presented by clearly villainous characters, and often the writer does not indicate clearly the distortion (i.e., that the common attitude is represented by a negatively portrayed minority while the majority of the characters share a more twenty-first-century outlook on an issue like wife-beating).3 In The Lady Chapel, the action opens with the performance of the York mystery plays, staged on wagons by the city’s guilds. One of the backdrops for the novel’s plot is Thoresby’s desire to build a Lady Chapel—a chapel devoted to the Virgin Mary—onto the York Minster. As Robb explains in her Author’s Note, “Lady Chapels were common additions to churches and cathedrals in the fourteenth century, when the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary was strong. Mary was seen as the gentle intercessor between God and man. In a time that suffered plague, war, famine, deluges, and drought, the Virgin was embraced by the people as the Mother who would beg God the Father to forgive His erring children and spare His hand” (284). Mary as emblem for woman has been the occasion for some well-considered feminist critique, but not in Robb’s novel. In fact, the novel offers traditional commentary on women’s roles and choices. For example, Lucie and Cecilia Ridley form a bond over their common understanding of women’s either / or choices in love: women can have dull, unsatisfying safety or something darker, potentially dangerous. In Lucie’s words, describing the difference between her feelings for her two husbands, “ ‘I loved Nicholas in a different way. He was a comfort to me. My love for Owen is darker. More reckless. Frightening’ ” (203). This is the kind of either/or dichotomy that feminists have quarreled with for years, but appears to receive uncritical acceptance in Robb’s novel. The Lady Chapel also features a homosexual love story in Ambrose Coats and Martin Wirthir. Owen Archer, talking to York musician Coats hoping to locate Wirthir, can sense the strong bond that exists between the two men, but cannot fathom what it might be: “Protective. Like his comrades-inarms had been of each other. But Wirthir was a pirate, Coats a town wait. What was their bond?” (135). To make sense of Coats’s protective concern for Wirthir, Owen turns to his own background as a soldier; perhaps this gesture clarifies readers’ ideas about the connection, or perhaps it is meant to suggest a parallel to an acknowledged heterosexual bond among men. Magda knows their relationship, but when Owen asks her why they are secretive about their friendship, she does not answer him, simply gives him a coded answer about Wirthir: he “ ‘is not the sort to bring a [compromised] lady to Magda’s hut’ ” (182). Later, when Lucie Wilton goes to visit Coats, she is able to intuit their connection: “Their eyes met, and suddenly

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Lucie understood what Martin was to Ambrose. ‘Our hearts are rarely wise in whom we love, are they?’ she said” (193). Although their need for secrecy concerning the true nature of their relationship is recorded at several points in the novel, signaling the social belief in its inherent sinfulness, characters like Lucie and Owen sympathize with them rather than judge them as one would expect. During the events of the novel, both men are shown as devoted and willing to sacrifice their own comfort for the other; in fact, their relationships is one of the most successful and committed of those shown in the novel. The Frazer series features a female sleuth, Frevisse, but both plots and characterization are weak in feminist terms. Below, I discuss The Squire’s Tale as a representative example. This series, more than the other two, sometimes sentimentalizes the period, both within the novels’ plots and through the valorizing author’s notes of the later books. While her emphasis on the often-overlooked achievements of the Middle Ages helps to educate readers, the outright comparisons to contemporary society that claim the higher ground for the Middle Ages are counterproductive.4 Frazer does avoid anachronistic subtopics, focusing instead on theories and aspects of life that seem appropriate to the time period: bodily humors, medical practice, systems for arbitrating disputes and investigating crimes. This series has an interesting history; it was cowritten for the first six books, then written solely by Gail Frazer beginning with The Prioress’ Tale (1997). The series has become even stronger under its sole authorship. The Prioress’ Tale was nominated for an Edgar award, and supplemental information on historical contexts and sources began to appear in the next title, The Maiden’s Tale (1998). With the following title, The Reeve’s Tale (1999), initial publication became cloth (earlier titles were published as paperback originals). The August 2004 publication of A Play of Isaac marks the first entry in a paperback-original spin-off series featuring the player Joliffe. Though Joliffe offers intriguing possibilities for greater mobility and worldliness than Sister Frevisse, this change represents the loss of the main potentially feminist quality of the original series, the female sleuth. In The Squire’s Tale, Frazer features a character that had a significant supporting role in the first Frevisse title, The Novice’s Tale: Robert Fenner is now married to the wealthy Lady Blaunche, six years his senior, and has become the father of three children. He is in love with his young ward, Katherine Stretton, and the plot serendipitously kills off his stepson (who wants to marry Katherine) and Robert’s wife, leaving Robert and Katherine free to fall into each other’s arms at novel’s end. While even the broad outline of the plot compromises any feminism possible in the novel whose subtexts of property holding and arbitration for legal disputes are quite promising, the particulars of Frazer’s development can seem actively misogynistic.


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Blaunche is cut from the same cloth as Lady Ermentrude of The Novice’s Tale and Dame Alys in The Prioress’ Tale: she is selfish, prone to rages and hypochondria, domineering, talks loudly, and laughs raucously. While she has health problems due to her too-frequent pregnancies, she inspires sympathy from no one; even the saintly Dame Claire, sent to provide medical assistance, dislikes her (168). Dame Claire opines that Blaunche’s health will not improve “ ‘until she decides to make it better. I think someone told her sometime that women feel rather than think, and she’s been intent on feeling as much as “womanly” possible ever since.’ That was an unusual amount of bitterness to come from Dame Claire” (158, emphasis in the original). We are told of her selfishness as a mother, and Robert thinks that his wife is “not someone he would wish on anyone, as mother-in-law or otherwise” (238, 178). Katherine Stretton, in contrast, is young (approximately seventeen), beautiful, decorous in her behavior, and considerate of others. The one thing shared by the two women is their love for Robert Fenner, and it is here that the essential unfairness of Frazer’s dichotomy is made clear. In both relationships, the woman declares and Robert acquiesces. And yet the differences between the women dictate diametrically opposite stories of their love for Robert. The young, beautiful Katherine is allowed to rail about her place to Frevisse: “ ‘I’m not supposed to be angry or anything else except obedient. That’s all that’s wanted from me. To be obedient and a profit to whoever can sell me or buy me or carry me off by force!’ ” (130). Her declaration of love at the novel’s end, abetted by Frevisse, is made with delicate scruples and fetching maidenliness; in the final sentences, readers see Katherine going “simply into his arms, that closed around her as if bringing her home. And Frevisse turned away and left them, with for the first time in too many days a quiet surety that some way now there would be goodness come all the ill there had been” (274). Given Frevisse’s role in the series, her endorsement of this conclusion must be seen as authoritative; it is not simply Robert’s desire that the readers are shown, but the moral propriety of this conclusion. The circumstances of Blaunche’s declaration for Robert are very different; so much is made to rest on the unpleasant aspects of her personality that the facts of her situation are essentially effaced. Character stereotype serves as a screen, rather than an aid, to the transmission of historical information. As readers are introduced to the Fenner marriage, Frazer embeds a concise summary of the property laws regarding women, but the effect of this summary is to promote sympathy for Robert rather than outrage at the fundamental legal inequalities. Robert is musing on the time periods they spend at his wife’s various manors: The pattern was an easy and familiar one after all these years but Robert doubted he could have brought Blaunche to any such change so easily now;

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her pleasure in having won him was too far in the past, and she remembered too easily now, when it suited her, that the manors she had brought to their otherwise landless marriage had been hers before they were his. And he was weak, he supposed, still to think of them that way, too, when by law whatever property a wife held became her husband’s when they married. That Blaunche had decided on him for her third husband and forced the marriage on him made no difference to the law: when they married, she and her properties, even those inherited by dower right from her first two husbands, had become his, no matter whether he had wanted them or Blaunche at all. (3)

Later in the novel, he throws these facts at her, saying of the contested estate, “ ‘It’s not yours! . . . It’s mine. Because when you married me everything that was yours became mine, to do with as I will’ ” (109, emphasis in the original). Robert is a sympathetic character, but the underlying legal inequalities demand treatment that is less distorted by the personalities involved. A charming man is insufficient justification for misogynistic legal structures. Sharan Newman’s Epigraphic Imagination In the first novel of Sharan Newman’s Catherine LeVendeur series, Death Comes as Epiphany, there is an intrusion in the otherwise strictly observed timeframe of the novel: “Catherine stumbled on the hem of her skirt as Cardinal Guy of Castello, emissary of Pope Innocent, offered her his arm. To be in the presence of such an exalted official of the church made her so nervous she could barely walk. It was fortunate that she was unaware that in three year’s time, this old student of Abelard’s would become Pope Celestine II” (125–26). The final sentence is clearly Newman’s voice, breaking out of Catherine’s world, and it mars the carefully constructed fabric of that world. In fact, this is the kind of information that would normally be found in an author’s note, but Death Comes as Epiphany does not include one and her acknowledgments in this book do not point to published sources for interested readers. Subsequent books include additional paratextual material, including maps (twelfth-century France, twelfth-century Paris, the Anglo-Norman north), family trees for her fictional characters, and various kinds of author’s notes (“a note on sources” in The Devil’s Door, but most often “afterword”). Newman offers bibliographies to readers who send a self-addressed stamped envelope to her care of the publisher; she also provides this information to visitors of her web site.5 The acknowledgments become more accessible to readers in that they offer leads to additional reading rather being primarily personal expressions of thanks. By Heresy, Newman’s Afterword resembles Monfredo’s “Historical Notes” sections: it


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includes several pages of factually based narrative descriptions of the real people and events that figure in her novel. Overall, Newman’s use of paratexts has grown. Her primary goal, restated in most of the books, is to entertain, not instruct (“there will not be a quiz”).6 Yet from the beginning, her research has been thorough, and her underlying intention to expand the boundaries of our knowledge of the period. Gradually, these facts have influenced the shape of her books; not the novels themselves, but her use of paratextual devices, has evolved in response to the high standard of research that Newman adhered to from the series’ origin. Epigraphic material includes quotations from many kinds of sources: in Death Comes as Epiphany, many of these were presented in English only; beginning with the second book, The Devil’s Door, original language versions are included as well. Newman’s sources include texts originally written in Latin, Old English, Old French, and Hebrew. She provides multiple dating systems, depending on the location and events of each chapter: the Roman calendar (with Kalends, Nones, and Ides), the Julian calendar, Saint’s Days, and the Hebrew calendar. Often these pieces—the dates, the Saints’ lives, the quotations—work together meaningfully, and interact with the contents of the chapters to which they are appended. More than that, they serve as incentives to readers to learn more while they provide particular names and titles to assist in the search. Gérard Genette’s chapter on epigraphs in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation argues that they are a fairly recent phenomenon and attributes their widespread use to the English gothic, a genre that is relevant to those working with medieval settings in their crime novels. According to Genette, [a]pparently the gothic novel, a genre simultaneously popular (in its themes) and erudite (in its settings), is the channel by which epigraphs in large number get into prose narrative: Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Lewis’s Monk (1795), and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) all contain an epigraph for every chapter. Walter Scott follows suit, with the same frequency. His epigraphs are generally attributed to real authors, which does not automatically guarantee their accuracy or authenticity. (146–47)

The duality that Genette attributes to the gothic is also true of the historical crime novels with medieval settings, those in my study most remote from readers’ experience and knowledge. The epigraphs take on an added importance for the authors and for the readers. Susan Lanser, after noting Walter Scott’s use of epigraphs, argues that their use is a key strategy of nineteenth-century women writers.7 For a writer like Sharan Newman, not only do the epigraphs contribute to the thematic development of the novel

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(as they do for all writers who use them), but they also provide authentication and demonstrate Newman’s knowledge, research, and scholarly capabilities (including languages). Her use of epigraphs becomes increasingly effective, and by Cursed in the Blood (the fifth book in the series) she can create not only scholarly effects but also indulge in some of the playfulness found in Gemma O’Connor’s use of epigraphs, discussed in chapter 6. The remoteness of the setting raises some of the same difficulties encountered in reading older texts, even though these books are written by contemporary authors with an accurate sense of their readers’ background knowledge. When Peter Rabinowitz argues that “if historically or culturally distant texts are hard to understand, it is often precisely because we do not possess the knowledge required to join the authorial audience” (127), he is thinking of authors remote from us in time or place. I believe the observation applies here too, where the author and reader are not that remote from each other but the novel’s historical content and the audience are. Of particular interest is his comment that “liberal arts education, to a certain extent, provides the relevant information so that we can join various authorial audiences, and so that the rhetoric of various authors may have its impact; many footnotes do much the same thing” (127). While Newman could certainly provide footnotes to her Catherine LeVendeur novels, they would be inappropriate in a crime novel. The afterwords do some of this work, but Newman’s epigraphs serve some of the functions that footnotes might in more scholarly forms. Using them as she does guides the reader through the text, providing a variety of contextualizing information. While not as direct as a footnote, they have a more frequent presence than that of the other apparatus—maps, acknowledgments, afterwords—and can provide corroboration close to the source. Corroboration is clearly provided in an example like chapter 17 of Cursed in the Blood; Newman quotes from Aelred of Rievaulx about the “cloud of lust breathed forth from the murky swamp of my body’s desires and the gushing passions of youth.” In the chapter that follows, we learn the story of the (fictional) brother of Edgar’s relationship with the (historical) Aelred. This is the kind of subplot that might seem too contemporary—but Newman has made her defense of it before she lays out the fictional tale. Genette identifies four functions of epigraphs. Of those four, Genette argues that the function that is undoubtedly the most canonical . . . consists of commenting on the text, whose meaning it indirectly specifies or emphasizes. This commentary may be very clear. . . .More often the commentary is puzzling, has a significance that will not be clear or confirmed until the whole book is read. . . .The attribution of relevance in such cases depends on the reader, whose


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hermeneutic capacity is often put to the test—as it has been from the very beginnings of the novelistic epigraph, with Scott, Nodier, Hugo, and Stendhal, who seem to have cultivated the appeal of epigraphs that are definitively puzzling or, as Hugo said, “strange and mysterious.” (157–58, emphasis in the original)

Newman’s epigraphical material comments on her text in various ways, from the relatively straightforward provision of pertinent information or context to more elaborate developments of plot and theme. While Catherine and Edgar are sailing to England in Cursed in the Blood, for example, readers know that they will arrive safely—but not at their planned destination. Readers know this because the epigraph is from a chronicle of the Scottish people, and the quotation describes an Edgar Atheling whose storm-tossed ship is eventually “compelled to land in Scotland.” The very first epigraph of that novel, from the Battle of Maldon, reminds readers of the importance of feudal loyalty and revenge, setting up the value system that dominates life at Wedderlie and motivates many of the characters. Because she is writing in the crime genre, some of her epigraphs are directed toward creating suspense, like those to chapters 7 and 12 in that novel. The epigraph from Beowulf to chapter 7, describing Grendel’s assaults on the mead hall, set readers up for Catherine’s sighting of the “monster,” which much later is revealed to be a moveable windmill. The epigraph to chapter 12 introduces the idea of an enemy within one’s household, deftly raising the question of who that enemy might be. For some time, it appears to be Waldeve himself; only much later in the novel is the question truly answered for the reader. As epigraphs point toward sources—both as support and as leads for further reading—they are made to match the chapter. In Cursed in the Blood, for example, most of the chapters take place in the north of England, but some are set in France. Chapter 8’s dating includes the ironically presented feast day of Saint Aethelthrytha (“the feast of St. Aethelthrytha, Saxon queen, who was married twice, yet died a virgin”) and a translation from Aelfric on The Life of St. Aethelthrytha. In this chapter, we see Catherine trying to make sense of the older Saxon culture that dominates life at Wedderlie, ending with her shocking discovery of Lazarus chained in the cellar. St. Aethelthrytha is a historical person who represents Saxon culture, and Aelfric’s Life underscores her importance to that culture. Two chapters later, the quotation confirms the historical fact of Cumin’s siege of Durham while the dating asks readers to think about a bishop of Nantes “who died leading the soldiers of Christ against the Saracen invaders.” The events of this chapter open in Paris, where Hubert is worrying about the dangers facing Catherine and is being questioned about his contacts with

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the Jews of Paris; other chapter events include Adalisa’s discovery that Solomon is Jewish. The conflict between Romans and Celts is brought to life through many of the saints referenced in the epigraphs, as various kinds of people were martyred, often colorfully, by the Romans for various, usually trivial, reasons. Epigraphs also work to develop, or comment on, the plot. For example, the ongoing argument between Bernard of Clairvaux and Abbot Suger of Saint Denis is carried out in Death Comes as Epiphany partly through plot and conversation and partly through the epigraphs Newman includes. Readers are asked to become more actively involved in discerning the story for themselves, rather than simply waiting for it to unfold. During the novel’s time period, Suger’s ambitious building program is proceeding, and a central element of the mystery depends upon the unscrupulous lengths to which Suger, aided by others, was willing to go to see his dream made real. These revenue-enhancing activities prove attractive to others uninterested in the glory of God, but very interested in taking some of the wealth for themselves. The feud between Suger and Bernard is approached indirectly. The first relevant reference comes in the epigraph to chapter 4, which is Suger’s inscription on the transept door of the cathedral: “Bright is the noble work, but, being nobly bright, the work should brighten the minds, so that they may travel, through the true lights, to the True Light.” A counterargument is presented in the epigraph to chapter 7, from Bernard of Clairvaux: “The church is refulgent in its walls and the poor suffer lack . . . And what of those ridiculous monstrosities of deformed beauty and beautiful deformity? Vile monkeys, fierce lions, monstrous centaurs, half men? . . . One could spend a whole day gaping instead of meditating on God. What ineptitude! What expense!” These two positions are not put into direct contact with each other at this point; they simply seem to express differing philosophies on church decoration. But in reading the chapter prefaced by Bernard’s sentiments, readers see the opulence of Suger’s quarters and thereby begin to discern the conflict. Suger’s bed is “covered with bright pillows and draped with a silk cloth to make a couch” and he offers his guests sugared almonds, gift from a crusader, in a silver dish (85). Readers have been clued in to how to read this description by the much earlier description of Heloise’s chamber at the Paraclete, with its “hard and narrow bed” (10). (That description is surely both literal and metaphorical.) Heloise tells Catherine how Suger drove her and her nuns from Argenteuil, making clear the past conflict between them and his much greater power. The argument between Suger and Bernard is made explicit in chapter 11, when Suger expresses to Catherine his view that “ ‘nothing is too fine to honor Our Lord’ ” and goes on to mention the disagreement with Bernard. Catherine is not convinced of the rightness


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of Suger’s position, but simply smiles and nods, understanding that Suger is simply “rehearsing his arguments for Abbot Bernard” (157). Later in the novel, a conversation among Abelard, John of Salisbury, Edgar, and Catherine seems to side squarely against Suger. John opines that “ ‘the root of this problem is Abbot Suger and his desire for glory’ ” and the others accept that while Suger wishes to glorify God, his seeking after riches has tempted others who wish only to enrich themselves (251). By extracting these examples from the novel’s development, I am making them seem more obvious than they are in the full text; the historical fact of Bernard’s attacks on Suger’s building project is integrated into the novel unobtrusively. It is there, it is presented accurately, but it does not dominate. If it were showier, it would distract, but presented in this way, it provides support for the credibility of Newman’s plot while demonstrating the basic elements of the conflict.8 She can also be seen to take the side against Suger, both through the crime plot and through the evaluations made by Catherine and her friends, but without distorting the facts of the conflict. The epigraphs also work with the text to provide necessary information to readers without lecturing them. The relics of Aldhelm in The Wandering Arm provide an excellent example of this rationale for commenting on the text. Again, it is text and paratext working together that produce results. Aldhelm is a Saxon saint, and Catherine and Solomon’s French ignorance of him provides a reasonable pretext for instructing the reader about his life and works (142–43). The epigraph to the very next chapter is from William of Malmesbury, mentioning Aldhelm’s relative neglect aside from what Bede wrote of him; this quotation corroborates Aldhelm’s existence through his inclusion in both William’s and Bede’s work, besides underlining his Englishness. Seven chapters later, Newman provides an epigraph that apparently does no more than set a rainy scene for the chapter’s events— but one from Saint Aldhelm’s writings. Focusing on a stolen relic provides the opportunity to examine the trade in stolen church property in material detail—including the nuts and bolts of “repackaging” undertaken by the thieves—and to present medieval beliefs concerning relics. Because this particular stolen relic belongs to a Saxon saint, there is a particular context for Edgar’s response to the relic that emphasizes the nature of his belief. This means that not only can the general case be laid out, but it can also be looked at more closely as Catherine addresses Edgar’s nationally inflected urgent need to believe in the power of one of his special saints. So, for example, characters speak of the saint’s agency in determining where his or her relics lie; they believe that “ ‘the saints protect themselves, we know. Thieves are struck with paralysis or blinding headaches’ ” unless the saint has some reason to desire a move to a better location (141). As Edgar continues his work on the box for the relic, he hopes that Aldhelm

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“ ‘wants to be found,’ ” the implication being clearly that without Aldhelm’s cooperation, Edgar will not locate the stolen bones (285). Paraclete-educated Catherine explains the concepts to serving-girl Lucia; that the bones are a symbol of the saint who once needed them who has now transcended this world into heaven, and that the relics themselves do not produce the miracles but God does, through the intercession of the saint (349). Catherine’s response to Edgar’s anger about the theft draws out further implications of these basic beliefs about relics. She says, “ ‘you aren’t thinking in terms of religion. You only see a Saxon being kidnapped by a Norman. Aldhelm isn’t in England or France really; he’s in heaven. No one here can make him do anything. If he has allowed his arm to be taken from Salisbury and then stolen from Philippe d’Harcourt, you might try to imagine what his purpose is’ ” (147). At the end, when it appears that the arm braced the pillar that, without that support, would have killed Catherine and Lucia, there is further discussion of the power vested in relics. Those who notice that in fact the pillar has been caught on a niche in the wall see this not as proof that relics serve no purpose, but rather that they serve as one part of God’s plans. Edgar fears that Catherine will dismiss Aldhelm’s powers, while he very much wants to believe in his saint; but Catherine simply says that the saint is “practical” like her husband. Finally, an ironic note is provided by the Afterword. There was an arm stolen from Salisbury, according to the historical record, and Newman reports that her initial research suggested it was Aldhelm’s. As she continued to research, however, she began to believe that the arm was not Aldhelm’s, though just whose it was remains unclear. So while readers gain accurate information about the trade in stolen church property, the veneration of relics, and Saint Aldhelm, the historical note that started Newman’s search leads to an apparent dead end. Now, these are well done but rather straightforward uses of paratexts. Perhaps the most important kind of textual commentary performed by Newman’s epigraphs relates to thematic development, particularly her feminist themes. Women’s place in society, their skills and duties, their restrictions and opportunities can all be persuasively and economically handled through epigraphic material. Medical knowledge is a continuing theme; women’s herbals, their medicine boxes, are mentioned frequently in the narratives. Occasionally, Newman corroborates these with epigraphs, as in the epigraph to chapter 16 of Cursed in the Blood, when she quotes an Old English recipe for a coughing remedy. Childbirth, of course, is a particularly compelling issue, and Catherine’s experiences are presented realistically. In Death Comes as Epiphany, the desperation of childless women is shown through the visitors that Catherine meets at Saint Denis


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and, more substantially, through the experiences of her sister-in-law, Marie. Catherine’s first stillbirth, chronicled in chapter 1 of The Wandering Arm, is prefaced by a quotation from a medieval poem, La Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne: “She goes to her rooms, and she suffers greatly there, / Her teeth clenched together, her pain increases. / Women who suffer the pains of childbirth / They know the agony well.” The dangers of childbirth is a vivid topic, one that is evoked by all of three of these medieval writers: Robb’s Lucie Wilton and Newman’s Catherine LeVendeur experience childbirth directly, and Frazer’s Sister Frevisse has occasion to observe it— and the fear of it—in others.9 For contemporary women readers, this is a resonant issue; as Monfredo does with her nineteenth-century American setting, the medieval setting authors know how to draw upon its powers. The intriguing difference, of course, is that Monfredo can point to medical advances that patriarchal authority denied to women, while the medieval period writers are working in a historical context where the dangers were clear, present, but virtually unavoidable. It would take an entire book to catalogue all of the relevant material, and I will not attempt to do so. But it is evident that Newman develops— through the interplay between text and paratext—a credible presentation of medieval women’s sexuality. In Strong as Death, where sexual exploitation of women is one of the main themes, Newman weaves together character dialogue and saints’ stories relating to women’s chastity. When Mondete talks to Catherine about how the saints manage to avoid rape, readers are provided with a larger context for their conversation through a series of saint’s days commemorating such virgin martyrs. Mondete challenges Catherine by asking, “Can you think of one saint’s life wherein she was threatened with rape and had to endure it? No, those women are torn with hot pincers and thrown to lions. They have their eyes gouged out and their breasts torn off, but they always die with their maidenheads intact” (226). The epigraphs on the martyred virgin saints presented both before and after this conversation in the novel demand that her description be taken seriously, not read as hyperbole. Throughout the series, Newman makes much of the virgin martyrs in her epigraphic selections, and of the specific circumstances of their martyrdoms. The detailed recording of those martyrdoms, and the absolute insistence on the intact maidenheads of the saints, alludes to the male obsession with virginity.10 And this is an area where I can attest to the educational power of the epigraphs; not only did I start looking up details of these saints’ lives, but I also had students curious about them—and intent on learning which of the characters in Cursed in the Blood were real. Godric of Finchale? Aelred of Riveaulx? Newman not only presents the feast days of these virgin martyrs—among other saints, of course—but she also provides

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an ironic commentary on the circumstances of their martyrdoms. And so we have “Saint Restitute, who was starved, chained, chased by Satan with a flaming sword, bitten by scorpions and finally beheaded. But, thanks to her guardian angel, she died a virgin” (Strong as Death 233). And we learn about “the feast of Saint Gemma, who preferred losing her life to losing her chastity” (Cursed in the Blood 105). And, less ominously but just as instructively, “Saint Scholastica, virgin and scholar” (Heresy 19). One could, in fact, do worse than chart Newman’s use of virgin saints’ lives as epigraphs in her series, but I will not do so here, as there are so many other features of her achievement that require attention. Catherine’s sister-in-law Marie had already spoken of these virgin martyrs in The Wandering Arm, before any of the examples I have cited above. Unlike Mondete, Marie speaks as a mother and puts their sufferings in maternal terms, as does Catherine. Shortly after giving birth, Catherine sneezes and then observes “ ‘Now I know why Saint Perpetua didn’t fear the gladiator’s sword. It couldn’t have hurt more than childbirth.’ ” Marie agrees, noting that she thinks “ ‘that’s why most of the stories of the female martyrs make such a fuss about their being virgins’ ” (34). These conversations are reminders of that commonplace about producing a book being analogous to producing a baby: only someone who has not experienced childbirth could think so. A historical crime writer like Newman can record—on behalf of contemporary women—respect for women who gave birth with minimal medical assistance, to children whose longevity was by no means assured. Newman’s use of paratextual devices, especially her epigraphs, make her an invaluable first reader of her own work, juxtaposing other texts to her own and inviting readers to learn and think—even if there won’t be a quiz. Along the way, she provides a few laughs as well. In chapter 13 of Strong as Death, Newman puns on “ascension” using the quotation and the dating. Her quotation is from a “Hymn for the Ascension, Molesme Breviary,” and the dating is “Thursday, May 28, 1142: The Feast of the Ascension” (216). And the scene? “Saint-Jean-Pied-le-Port/Donibane-Garazi, at the foot of the Pyrenees.” In the chapter, the pilgrims spend several days in the village, making preparations for their ascent into the mountains. Sometimes Newman provides amusing comments on her chosen saints; here are two examples from Cursed in the Blood. Chapter 12 references “the feast of Saint Serf, a Briton, about whom nothing is known.” The reader who wonders if the joke is on her can look up Saint Serf: yes, he is real, and yes, definitive knowledge of his deeds is lacking. Chapter 17 takes place on the feast day of Saint Helena, described as “mother, devout convert, pilgrim, finder of the True Cross but not British, despite what Geoffrey of Monmouth said” (emphasis in the original).


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Catherine LeVendeur as Mediator; Real Historical Figures The central character takes on a role even more crucial than in the other series; Catherine LeVendeur must provide a balance between twenty-firstcentury needs and expectations and twelfth-century reality. The copy on the dust jackets is only partially correct with regard to Catherine. The seventh book, To Wear the White Cloak, says “set against the backdrop of twelfth-century France, Catherine’s life is both a reflection of the bonds placed upon a woman by her society and the ways in which a strong personality could triumph in spite of those strictures.” On the jacket of the next title, Heresy, the same idea is put in a very slightly different form,11 then adds a couple of slightly contradictory notes. First, the copy begins by claiming that Catherine is “a unique spirit, determined to make her way in the world”; later, it claims that Newman “puts flesh to bone by creating portraits of people who are not so different from ourselves.” Are these people just like us, or are they unique spirits? Did medieval society permit the kind of transcendence described on the dust jacket? Probably not, but in Catherine’s role as mediator we can see both individuality and conformity. Newman makes Catherine unusual for her time in some ways, but makes those points responsibly clear for readers (rather than implying that Catherine was absolutely typical). Newman does this through her own authorial voice, and also brings it to narrative life. For example, when Catherine discovers her father’s Jewish background—and his existing Jewish relations—she is taken aback but does not reject them outright. In sketching out the status of Jews in twelfth-century France in the Afterword to The Wandering Arm, Newman provides a plausible context, then offers a direct explanation: “while Catherine’s acceptance of her family may be unusual, I do not think it impossible” (372). During the course of the novel, Eliazar thinks about Catherine’s unusual response to his family; he makes it clear that she is exceptional for finding room for them alongside the teachings of her church (190). Catherine’s sister Agnes represents a more typically medieval response to the news that one is related to Jews: horror and denial. Their mother’s excess piety turns out to be the result of her shame and fear in connection with her husband’s background, and Newman’s novels offer enough examples of casual anti-Semitism to make the point that Catherine’s perspective is—as Newman puts it—unusual but not impossible. On many subjects, typical medieval attitudes unrelieved by contemporary perspective would be unpalatable, but Catherine’s role as mediator allows Newman to balance the needs of her readers with the obligation to portray medieval society accurately. Earlier, I discussed the presentation of physical abuse in Robb’s Owen Archer series, noting how the more common attitude

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of the time was only represented by “bad” characters. Newman’s solution, in The Devil’s Door, is to use Catherine’s idiosyncratic (even erratic) ways of thinking and behaving to offer readers the attitude with which they are more comfortable without distorting the beliefs of the period. Countess Alys is brought to the Paraclete, badly beaten and having recently miscarried. While caring for her immediate needs, a whole history of injury is revealed. Old scars and mishealed flesh are crisscrossed all over her body, and Catherine is enraged. She assumes that Alys’s husband Raynald is responsible, but Heloise cautions her that there are numerous other possible explanations and speaks from an awareness that there are those who would be within their rights to have treated Alys in this manner. In the end, it turns out that Alys’ s mother was responsible for the older beatings, her husband for the most recent, and Alys herself was responsible for the miscarriage. Those involved are not simply demonized, nor are they exonerated; Newman presents their own views of their actions, which they believed were for the good of the family and thus justified, but keeps a distance from their views through Catherine. Eventually, Catherine forgives Raynald because he shows remorse, gives alms, and decides to go on a pilgrimage of expiation. So, while Catherine can help mediate between medieval and twenty-first-century views, Newman strikes an effective balance between potentially conflicting points of view. The relationship between Catherine and Edgar is similarly out of the ordinary but responsibly framed. Theirs is a love match, and the relationship remains idealized throughout the entire series. Regardless of the difficulties they endure, both remain steadfastly in love with each other. Other characters comment on their atypical relationship; a few admire it, but more find it peculiar. The knights in Strong as Death and Edgar’s family in Cursed in the Blood express open disapproval; clearly, this is not how marriage is supposed to work. Friends of the couple, like Solomon and Astrolabe, tease them for their devotion to each other, not making a negative judgment but making clear the oddity of the relationship. Finally, Newman can always invoke the example of Heloise and Abelard to justify Catherine and Edgar’s profound and continuing love for one another. While both Catherine and Edgar struggle with the medieval belief that it is best to remain celibate— and both of them had planned on taking religious vows before they met— they see through the example provided by Heloise that they are right to act upon their love for each other. Shortly after their marriage, when asked by Edgar whether she has regrets about leaving the convent, Catherine says, “ ‘No. Mother Heloise was right. It’s better to follow one’s heart. Insincere prayers don’t rise. When I’m with you, my gratitude is real. God was very kind to let me find you’ ” (The Devil’s Door 400).


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As recently as 1993 a high-quality reference source in the Cambridge Concise History series instructs readers that in medieval France “women were regarded as physically and emotionally unsuitable to hold power” (Price 39).12 Given that kind of general historical context, it is a challenge to show women doing anything at all, let alone anything significant. Newman’s use of real historical figures, including strong abbesses and noble wives who ran the complex legal, financial, and military enterprises of their families while their husbands were abroad, adds credibility to her project in total and provides a contact point for Catherine’s more ordinary status. One example of this kind of figure is Sybil of Anjou, Countess of Flanders, who features in Heresy. Within the novel, Sybil is just one of the women who had been left to run things while their husbands are off to the Holy Land as crusaders. At the Council of Reims, several of these women are in attendance to petition for redress, and listening to them, Catherine thinks that she was learning more about the situation throughout Christendom than would ever be presented at the council. These women were the ones who had been left with the responsibilities of their fathers, brothers and husbands added to their own. Many were traveling with countesses and viscountesses who were bringing charges against other nobles and also church officials who had appropriated rights. They were well informed about the situation in their lands. No one said a word about heretics. (161–62)

Sybil is simply one of the most powerful of these women, and Newman sketches her background before putting her in contact with Catherine: “her husband, Thierry, had also gone to the Holy Land, leaving Sybil to run the country, care for their four small children and deliver the fifth safely. No sooner had he left than their old enemy, Baldwin of Hainaut, had attacked the country” (71). Baldwin’s attack violates an agreement he had made to keep the peace while Thierry was gone. Sybil organizes the armed response, which is fairly successful, and then she arranges a truce for the final month of her pregnancy. As soon as the child is born, Baldwin disregards that agreement as well. The countess is going to Reims to present her case against Baldwin to the pope, and as she plans her strategy, readers get a glimpse of an energetic woman exercising authority in several spheres: she runs an army, administers Flanders, and successfully negotiates a way through the legal and religious power structures to get what she requires for her country and her family. Newman’s Afterword presents factual information about Sybil, including her activities before and after the period covered by the novel, corroborating her fictionalized behavior within the novel.

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Heloise is a brilliant choice for inclusion in the series. The story of Heloise and Abelard is famous, of course, but most readers think of it as a story of romance gone awry, with Abelard’s castration a shocking punishment for sexual misbehavior. Yet there are other lenses through which the story can be viewed: how many readers would think of it as a story about access to education? David Noble’s A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (1992) presents it very convincingly in just those terms. “The relationship between Heloise and Abelard,” Noble argues, “put in full Gothic relief the promise and limits of the new culture of learning” (143). Of course the story reveals very different patterns of access to education for men and women, and the follow-up to the dramatic end of their love story underscores that discrepancy even more boldly. Although his theology was attacked by Bernard of Clairvaux and he suffered considerably, Abelard eventually embraced his castration as a blessing, became a proponent of celibacy, and returned to teaching in Paris. Heloise’s fate was quite different. As Noble describes it, she, by all accounts his intellectual equal (and as abbess of the Paraclete apparently a more able administrator), was condemned to the relative isolation of the convent. Now denied even backdoor access, through Abelard, to the maleonly centers of learning, she was unwillingly separated from her lover, husband, and teacher, from her child (male children were no longer permitted in female houses), and even from her own sexuality. As her letters poignantly testify, she did not don the veil by choice but out of deference to Abelard; with breathtaking sincerity and unbroken passion, she continued to maintain a dignified defiance of his sterile piety. One can only wonder what might have been had Abelard remained under this remarkable woman’s influence. Could their conjugally conjoined brilliance have given the emergent culture of learning a different tone? But the dominant culture of celibacy to which Abelard was now so well suited offered her nothing but marginality and perpetual torment. The real burden of the calamity thus fell on her. Whereas he had merely been, in effect, cut to fashion, she had been cast utterly adrift and aside. (146)

Bonnie Wheeler’s introduction to Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman describes Heloise as “a model of the French public female intellectual, the first and one of a very few such figures before modern times. Great and learned women abounded in the Middle Ages, but not many others had what in later times would constitute the equivalent of a university education—an education denied women until the modern moment” (xvii). The collection of essays edited by Wheeler is invaluable for the specialist, focusing as it does on Heloise herself, analyzing her writings and achievements. For the purposes of Newman’s broader readership,


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however, what is of primary interest in Heloise’s story is what it shows us about women’s opportunities during this period and, as I argue below, what the contested nature of the story reveals about the place of women in historical scholarship. Heloise’s experiences show that Newman is writing of a time that offered women opportunities they would later be denied, thereby lifting that claim above the subjective level of wishful thinking. Wheeler refers to “the culturally liminal early decades of the twelfth century” and notes that “by the time the institutional structures of the University of Paris were forged in early thirteenth century, women had been thoroughly excluded from its formal institutional life” (xvii). The story of Heloise and Abelard is all the more useful for being a contested one. Not only are the facts themselves interesting, but the arguments over their meaning—including the authorship of the letters themselves— reveal the continuing relevance of the story for feminist critics. The best summary of twentieth-century arguments about the Heloise and Abelard correspondence, including consideration of the attitudes those arguments reveal toward Heloise’s nature (and, by extension, other medieval women), is Peter Dronke’s Abelard and Heloise in Medieval Testimonies. Heloise’s expression of her own sexuality is, unsurprisingly, a contested issue for many of the (mostly male) commentators. While some scholars “have thought the letters contained elements too sensual and sinful to be entirely true,” Dronke notes, “it is paradoxical that other recent scholars . . . have thought the letters too exemplary to be entirely true” (9). Dronke traces the debate clearly and concisely while showing how many commentators use their own subjective ideas of what women are like—and how men should manage them—as the basis for their judgments about the Abelard/Heloise letters. Judgments that are presented as scholarly are in fact founded on what these commentators see as “emotionally possible or appropriate for the situation of the famous pair” (13). Drawing on a variety of sources from Heloise’s time and after, Dronke presents a cogently argued case for what was in fact “emotionally and expressively possible for contemporaries of Abelard and Heloise, and for the generations that followed them, when they thought about love” (14). He concludes that most of their contemporaries, and those in immediately following generations, “were convinced of the uniqueness and stature of Abelard’s and Heloise’s love, and regarded their tragedy with wonderment and compassion” (31). Dronke’s book is from the late 1970s and it refutes John Benton’s wellknown assertion of forgery. The most recent study, M. T. Clanchy’s Abelard: A Medieval Life (1999), argues that Benton’s work caused a lull, both popular and scholarly, in the work on Heloise and Abelard. Moving forward to Clanchy’s book, then, we would expect to see a reflection of still more progress in thinking about the famous relationship and indeed the

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copy on the back of the book announces that “the author’s many new findings include the discovery that it was Heloise who inspired many of Abelard’s most profound ideas.” Clanchy’s book overall, however, reads like a regression from Dronke and Noble. Her contributions to Abelard’s thinking, according to Clanchy, are traditionally feminine: “what she contributed was her imaginative understanding of the classics and, in particular, her passionate feelings about the pagan sages” (277, emphases added). Though Clanchy ends his book acknowledging that Heloise was the only equal Abelard tolerated in his life and quoting from her as the last word (335), much of his discussion seems not much different from the oldfashioned commentary of Father Muckle summarized by Dronke in Abelard and Heloise. Clanchy writes that, in her letters to Abelard, she was “embarrassing [and] unrealistic” (152); he argues that in her second letter, “ungenerously perhaps, she used his castration as a way of humiliating him and she remained dominant in the relationship henceforward” (154). This view of their situation is nothing less than astonishing, given the facts of their subsequent lives and careers. Characteristic of Clanchy’s reduction of Heloise’s stature as a scholar and abbess is his discussion of Peter the Venerable’s behavior after Abelard’s death. Peter had taken Abelard in at the end of his life, and after his death the abbot first wrote to Heloise, then returned Abelard’s body himself to her at the Paraclete. Dronke offers the following comments on Peter’s letter: The great abbot of Cluny does not shun a language rich in erotic connotations. At this solemn moment he uses sexual expressions consciously and daringly . . . [these words] serve to establish a perspective which is both human and divine, and which brings with it a profound optimism: the lovers Abelard and Heloise will be reunited in heaven as lovers. The heavenly bond of caritas is stronger and finer (validior, melior) than the physical bond (carnalis copula)—yet Peter feels no need to disparage that bond. Not a word about their being washed clean of the foulness of earthly lust: there is not a phrase in Peter’s letter such as the twentieth-century moralistic scholars delight in using, and delight in thinking makes them more truly medieval in outlook than the rest of us. (23)

Peter praises Heloise for her learning and her piety, saying that he has long admired her. To bring Abelard’s body to the Paraclete personally has been seen by some commentators as an expression of that admiration. Clanchy’s presentation of the story is very different. While he acknowledges Peter’s praise of Heloise, he explains Peter’s motivations for writing in this way to Heloise like this: “Peter understood that he was dealing with a prima donna” (159). The letter is reduced in importance, though Clanchy admits that “why Peter went so far to placate Heloise nevertheless remains something


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of a mystery” (160). If one sees Heloise as an unreasonable, demanding female who needs placating, of course, it would be hard to understand the abbot’s expressions of admiration and his actions. Clanchy says that “by personally returning Abelard’s body to Heloise for burial at the Paraclete, Peter the Venerable acknowledged Abelard’s achievement at the Paraclete” (223). The Paraclete, Clancy reaffirms later in the book, “was Abelard’s principal monastic achievement” (263). It is difficult not to see all these elements fitting together to reduce Heloise’s achievements at the Paraclete; in this telling of the story, she is merely a manipulative woman. In contrast to Noble’s insistence on her administrative skill as abbess, Clanchy’s portrait of Heloise seems to be a regression, a losing of ground. This regression is significant given Heloise’s status as one of the most important women of this period. Fortunately, we have Newman’s presentation of Heloise and Abelard to illustrate the power of narrative to shape a more just perception of Heloise. Her version of the story, based on their later years, emphasizes the feminist potential of the story yet does not conflict with the scholarly record in any way. What Noble, Dronke, and Clanchy explain, Newman illustrates convincingly. As might be expected, the first two books incorporate most directly the Heloise and Abelard story, but theirs is a continuing presence. Abelard’s death during the events of Strong as Death allow Newman to incorporate Peter the Venerable’s esteem of Heloise and his acknowledgment of her importance to Abelard, in contrast to Clanchy’s minimizing of that aspect of the story. In the novels set after Abelard’s death, Heloise continues to play a role, and readers are shown her success as an abbess and the high esteem in which she continues to be held. In Heresy, a character distinguishes between Abelard and Heloise’s intellectual tendencies; while she wishes to expand her knowledge, Abelard focused on the self-promoting dissemination of his (311). Heloise’s intellectual gifts are acknowledged, as is the rigor of the education received by those training at the Paraclete. To the skeptical, Catherine offers her Paraclete connection as a credential, along with the names of Paris teachers she has heard lecture. Her ability to speak Latin convinces more than one doubting, arrogant man that she is educated. Even Edgar’s sister, Margaret, who is clearly not the scholar Catherine is, takes pride in the quality education provided to all under Heloise’s charge. When a churchman tells her to rejoice in her “ ‘pure and simple faith’ ” that will keep her from heresy, she is incensed: “Margaret smiled to cover her annoyance. She had been at the Paraclete nearly a year now, and while her faith was still pure, she hoped, there was nothing simple about it. Heloise would have been ashamed if a student of hers could not find her way through any theological tract. They were expected to be able to

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recognize rhetorical errors that were often the basis for accusations of heretical doctrine” (Heresy 139). This response strikes several notes. First, it emphasizes the high educational standards Heloise has for all of her students. Second, it underscores the patronizing male attitude toward women’s knowledge and religious belief. Finally, it shifts the source of heresy from undisciplined curiosity to the more analytical category of “rhetorical errors.” Heloise’s continuing devotion to Abelard is also brought to life in a way that values her commitment, in contrast to most twentieth-century commentators who are either shocked by her irreligiosity or refuse to believe that a woman could remain focused on her love for Abelard while acting a very pious public role. In Death Comes as Epiphany, the tampered-with psalter is important because of the Paraclete’s special status as the convent Abelard founded, and Heloise sees the attack on her house as really an attack on Abelard himself. This attitude is consistent with that of the Heloise of the letters, and Newman makes convincing points about women’s place in the religious hierarchy. Heloise explains to Catherine, “ ‘If the Paraclete were a normal convent, a few noncanonical pages would be dismissed as an example of the inability of women to understand theology. But we were founded by Peter Abelard and many people believe that means we knowingly wallow in dissent and corruption’ ” (12). During the course of the novel, Catherine interacts with Heloise at the Paraclete and with Abelard in Paris; readers do not see them together, but Catherine’s observations go a long way toward reconstructing their past and recording Heloise’s long-time strength in the face of adversity. In the second novel, the two are together briefly, on one of Abelard’s visits to the Paraclete. When she sees how infirm he looks, she speaks as does the Heloise of the letters, insisting on his primacy in her life; he too sounds like the Abelard of the letters and of his contemporaries’ reports when he says to her, “ ‘I will be immortal. Do you think an intellect such as mine can be extinguished so easily?’ ” (The Devil’s Door 79). In Strong as Death, Heloise’s indifference to pilgrimages is due to her own unwilling separation from Abelard: “Life was enough of a pilgrimage for her. Staying in one place when her whole being longed to be somewhere else was as arduous as anything that might face them on the way to Compostela” (109). Newman’s fictional portrayal of the famous couple is enriched by epigraphs from their own writings, plus others taken from writings about them.13 Newman’s use of Heloise and Abelard stands alongside the historical work done on them, and it enriches the feminism of her narratives significantly. Her representation is based on current scholarship—including access to not-yet-published material on Heloise as abbess—and it does the story far more justice than does a portrayal like Clanchy’s. Heloise, Sybil of Anjou, and the other


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powerful women included in the series make the point forcefully that, the Cambridge Concise History notwithstanding, women could and did hold power in medieval France. Pilgrimage An economical fusion is created in Strong as Death when Newman sends Catherine and Edgar on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James in Compostela, Spain. Canterbury Tales lurks as an inspiration for the pilgrimage, with its improbable mix of pilgrims and its emphasis on their decidedly impious natures. Another metanarrative the book draws on is one kind of golden age crime classic; those like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and Murder on the Orient Express, with their traveling-yet-isolated groups and gradual revelations of hidden relationships among a strangely assorted company. These literary models, high and low culture, provide an authenticating scaffolding and prepare readers for the material details of the book. Newman puts the plot to good use in exploring key themes relating to medieval religion (belief and practice) and women’s sexuality. The events of the novel take place from March 12 to June 23, 1142, with a brief glimpse in the epilogue of the following February, when Catherine and Edgar are back in Paris. Their purpose for undertaking the pilgrimage is to ask Saint James to intercede on their behalf and end their childless condition. In establishing the background for their pilgrimage, Newman conveys attitudes on human relations to God’s plans, the role of prayers, dreams, and observance of spiritual practices. When the novel opens, Catherine and Edgar are at the shrine of Mary Magdalene in Vézelay, praying for her intercession. Catherine has a dream that she does not understand but is convinced that it is “a true dream,” one that has an important message for them. After Vézelay, they visit the dying Peter Abelard in Saint Marcellus; he too believes in the dream’s import and interprets it for them, sending them both on the pilgrimage to Compostela. The core group comes together on April 25 at Le Puy. Some people are deliberately seeking out their traveling companions; others simply end up together. Although these travelers seem, like Chaucer’s, to be an unrealistically diverse group, Newman provides a plausible explanation for the presence of each. At the center are the four knights, veterans of an earlier crusade and fulfilling a promise they had made to each other years before: Gaucher, Rufus, Hugh, and Norbert have a dual purpose for their pilgrimage; remission of past sins and a mysterious “other, less holy reason” (39). The elegant Lady Griselle of Lugny is traveling on behalf of her husband who died in battle, unshriven, though readers learn this only gradually (51, 65, 91). Her entourage includes several armed guards and her maid. The jongleurs,

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Roberto and Maruxa, are returning to their home and children in Spain, while the pilgrimage undertaken by the prostitute Mondete Ticard emphasizes penance and personal suffering—she seeks isolation and discomfort throughout the journey. There are Jewish merchants, including Catherine’s publicly unacknowledged uncle Eliazar and her cousin Solomon, traveling for commercial reasons; Catherine’s father flits uneasily between the Jewish group that includes his trading partner and the Christian pilgrims, but his original reason for joining the pilgrimage was to watch over Catherine. Newman includes a group of Germans who have been sent on behalf of their village, “saved from a fire by the intercession of Saint James” (72). Ironically, two of the Germans are swept away in a flash flood, leaving half of their party to finish the mission. At the top of the socioreligious scale is Peter, Abbot of Cluny, traveling with an enormous entourage; Brother James and Brother Rigaud are part of this entourage but both are revealed to have significant connections to other pilgrims, connections that they bitterly regret and would prefer to disavow. After the abbot’s group changes course, the group is joined by three men seeking the abbot; these are the scholars he had approached about translating the Koran. Although the scholars have come from Barcelona, where they are researching astronomy, they are Norman, Dalmatian, and Cordoban Muslim. This is another instance of how historical writers build on known fact, for Peter the Venerable did make the trip to Spain to collect late tithes from the emperor and to commission the first Latin translation of the Koran, reasons that are woven into the fabric of the novel. The other pilgrims, even those with material rather than spiritual reasons for their journeys, are happy to join such a large, well-protected group. Once the pilgrims are underway, Newman draws upon her golden age crime fiction inspirations and gradually reveals the web of connections among the pilgrims, even those who apparently could have no connection at all. Many of these revolve around the four knights, whose deaths generate a great deal of suspense. Various objects appear in their belongings, objects whose significance is unclear to the other pilgrims—and to the reader—but whose effect on the knights is electrifying. Gaucher finds pig’s testicles in his bag; later, Hugh finds a gold ring with its central stone prized out (20, 103). Norbert is the first to die, apparently naturally (though Newman signals the poison from the beginning); then Hugh’s throat is cut in the middle of the night, when he was out for either a call of nature or a sexual assignation. The next to die is Brother Rigaud, who had been part of the group of knights before repudiating his past life and joining the monastery; he is found in the church with a spear run through his body from anus to throat (though he too was poisoned before being impaled in this dramatic fashion). Rufus is hung. The final victim, Gaucher, is murdered after the


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identity of the killer has been revealed and that murder takes place in front of the readers. Some of the challenges this particular group of pilgrims face are specific to the murder mystery, but Newman presents a specific portrait of the dangers and inconveniences that would have been faced by all pilgrims. The trip is wearying and expensive; the first scene with Lady Griselle is at a river crossing, where she insists on the right of pilgrims to free passage but the ferryman, in possession of the only means of crossing for miles, can charge whatever price he chooses (49–51). Not only must the pilgrims negotiate for food and lodgings (when they are not sleeping out of doors), but they must also cope with all sorts of weather and physical ailments, find bathhouses, get their shoes resoled, and try to avoid getting cheated too badly. Newman’s portrait of the pilgrimage makes clear that the pious nature of the travelers’ mission does not exempt them from the kinds of unpleasantness faced by tourists of all times and places. Merchants charge outrageous prices, and the pilgrims are preyed upon by counterfeit beggars (274) and robbers of various stripes. The armed guards accompanying the Cluniacs, the Jewish merchants, and wealthier pilgrims like the Lady Griselle serve a very real function. Between Moissac and the foot of the Pyrenees, the party is threatened twice by bandits (220). The Basques, especially feared by the pilgrims, first extort protection money from the group, then appear at a later river crossing to demand more (247–48, 292–93). Not all of the challenges are dangerous. To Catherine’s surprise, touristcentered tat and tackiness is everywhere along the route. Early in the journey, at Conques, Catherine finds “pins, honeycakes and felt badges” in the shape of scallop shells, the symbol of St. James. She wants a pin, but Edgar is critical of its workmanship and convinces her to wait for something better to be purchased at Compostela (99). When their arduous journey finally ends, they find “every street to be lined with souvenir sellers,” wine sellers doing “a brisk business,” and pilgrims pushing and shoving at the shrine (379–80). Having arrived, Catherine and Edgar have no dramatic epiphanies: “ ‘We’re here,’ Edgar said. ‘Now what do we do?’ Catherine thought for a moment. ‘I suppose we go home’ ” (380). Newman’s portrayal of the pilgrimage addresses itself not just to the dramatic—showing the pilgrimage in idealized terms as a holy journey or relentlessly debunking those pieties that do exist—but to the entire experience. Strong as Death presents in a way appropriate to a popular form like the crime novel the same kinds of surprising, complex mixture of piety and grubby reality found in higher culture texts like Canterbury Tales and T. S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi.” The web of preexisting connections among the pilgrims is spun out deftly, and it prepares readers for the final connection to be revealed—the one that has led to the murders of the four knights. While convincing in

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plot terms, and successful in generating suspense, these connections also provide information about the structures of medieval life. The life of the jongleurs is explored, and through their voices Newman can express a broader view of local customs. Because Roberto and Maruxa have traveled so much, they know about regional variations in customs—and the importance of observing the local customs—and Catherine’s response to their knowledge adds further to Newman’s portrait of the period. “ ‘Tread on a local custom,’ Roberto tells Catherine and Edgar, ‘and you can find yourself dead’ ” (106). Among other topics, these characters provide an opportunity for a brief discussion of misunderstandings common between Muslims and Christians, a conversation that adds a less-esoteric note to the conversations elsewhere in the novel about Peter the Venerable’s translation project. When Catherine asks whether Allah is “ ‘one of their gods,’ ” Roberto explains not only the fact of one god, many prophets in Islam, but also that Muslims make the same mistake about Christians “ ‘because of the shrines to the saints’ ” (105, 106). Catherine is a highly educated woman, yet she lacks the most basic knowledge of “Saracen” beliefs; it is through their travels, and their need for new stories, that Roberto and Maruxa know more than Catherine and are less willing to assume that they have access to the only truth. Anti-Semitism is a major theme throughout the series; this is a natural consequence of an author developing an interest in disenfranchised groups. Women may be the starting point for research, but these other groups attract interest as well. In her first author’s note, included in the second series title, The Devil’s Door, Newman addresses this directly: “I am particularly interested in writing about the diversity of medieval society, which is only beginning to be studied. There are a number of excellent books and articles now available on Jewish life in Europe, on women, both in and out of the convent, on the poor, on monastic life in general, and many other previously neglected aspects of medieval life” (406). Not only the common experiences of these different groups in relation to women, but also the differences in their situations, are illuminating, as the next chapter shows in the context of Monfredo’s North Star Conspiracy. Anti-Semitism gets a particularly interesting development in the context of this Christian pilgrimage, most dramatically in the revelation of James as Eliazar’s and Hubert’s brother Jacob, but worked out throughout the novel. The pilgrimage provides a valuable opportunity to show the constant renegotiation of the Jews’ status in the larger group. Each stop entails some new arrangement for keeping the Jews separate from the rest; at larger stops, like Estella, there is a Jewish quarter, but elsewhere there functions an elaborate informal mechanism, made possible by the careful deference of the Jews and the tolerance of the Christians. At one of their stops, there is


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only the one hostel, and the Jewish merchants are forced to stay there, and to be “grateful that the monks of Roncevalles were willing to allow them in” (238). It is crucial to the safety of Eliazar and Solomon that they are traveling with letters of protection from Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, with whom they have a long-standing business arrangement. This protection is galling to several Christian members of the group, including the abbot of Cluny, Peter (154). Later in the novel, Newman provides an interesting fact connected to Peter’s distaste for the Jews: he has borrowed money from them on several occasions (203). Brother James, too, is very conscious of the protection afforded them by Saint-Denis. On more than one occasion he restrains his impulses to victimize them because he cannot do so with impunity, making clear the status of those Jews without such backing. The group of Jewish merchants from Toulouse joins the original pilgrims at Moissac, allowing Newman to extend her picture of medieval Jewish life still further. There are some negotiations undergone between the groups before it is decided that Catherine’s group of pilgrims, now being parted from the Cluniacs because of the abbot’s new plans, will travel with the well-guarded Toulouse Jewish contingent; one of Aaron’s conditions is that Catherine’s group must not proselytize. The enlarged Jewish contingent, now about thirty in number, makes religious observance easier for Eliazar and provides a little more safety. Newman is careful to include both practical, material consequences and the more abstract issues of justice and standing. The first time we hear of the group is in the context of Eliazar’s delight that “ ‘the brethren from Toulouse are traveling with their own cook. We’ll have real food tonight!’ ” (176). When the group stops in Najera, they construct an erov for the Sabbath. While the larger group makes observance easier, it also makes the Jews more conspicuous; James finds “his nerves were grated with the sound of their prayers” (218). Other topics woven into the pilgrimage narrative include the functioning of justice, religious belief, and attitudes toward women. What has happened to these pilgrims earlier, and their experiences on the journey, serve to illustrate material points. This strategy for developing an interpretation works together with the epigraphic approach discussed above; Newman integrates them so neatly that it can be difficult to separate the strands. Because of the crimes committed along the pilgrimage, there are several opportunities to see inquiry and adjudication in action. After Hugh is murdered, the pilgrims appeal to the abbot to travel among his entourage rather than follow behind. The abbot agrees, but sends James and Rigaud “ ‘to discover the truth of the matter’ ”; he wants to be sure that the killer was not among the pilgrims (115). Thus, James becomes the only authorized sleuth in the novel, and as the pilgrims continue moving toward Compostela, readers see what methods are available to the monks and the

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foundation of their authority of to ask questions and search pilgrims’ belongings and persons. James and Rigaud initially divide their questioning according to their personal convenience; dissatisfied with the results, they seek permission from the abbot to search everyone’s possessions. His permission is calculated to counter the objections of pilgrims like Griselle of Lugny; less-important travelers like the Jews and the jongleurs can be investigated freely. After the initial round of questioning and limited searches, the two monks decide to shelve the matter because “there was no apparent reason” for any pilgrim to have committed the murder (133). Later developments are precipitated by the actions of others, seeking to create a scapegoat after Rigaud is murdered. Twice an accusation is brought, both times against vulnerable members of the group. These accusations provide the opportunity for Newman to show justice in action, as it plays out on the ground rather than simply in theory. When Solomon is accused of murdering Brother Rigaud, Hubert and Eliazar each organize a different method of defense. Hubert, Edgar, and the Lady Griselle appear at the abbey to attest to Solomon’s good character. Eliazar is skeptical about the efficacy of their strategy; while he hopes their testimony will free Solomon, he begins arrangements to collect ransom (205). Newman can further develop her picture of anti-Semitism as well as showing the pragmatic aspects of medieval justice. Clearly, testimonials of the accused’s good character are considered pertinent to judgment; equally clearly, the Jewish community has long since learned what methods are efficacious for their particular circumstances as the feared, despised, envied other. Newman devotes chapter 12 to the circumstantial depiction of Solomon’s “arrest,” trial by clergy, and subsequent exoneration. He is summarily gathered up by the guards, yet he does not resist them, knowing that he is better off with the forces they represent than with the townspeople en masse, who would be happy to simply hang him from a nearby tree. When the guards take Solomon into custody, the question arises as to who they serve; they are clearly armed men, but just whose armed men they are is not immediately visible—there is no uniform, nor any livery to distinguish them from any other group of armed guards. In fact, they are temporarily in service to the abbot. Hubert’s strategy is to take their letters from Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, put on their best appearance, and vouch for Solomon’s good character. Solomon is questioned by the clerical authorities, including the local abbot, Peter the Venerable, and Stephen of Osma. Monks serve as scribes, and questions revolve around witnesses, the character of the accused, and other practical matters. Peter the Venerable asks whether anyone has come forward to speak on behalf of Solomon; he learns from Brother James that the Jews have offered to pay Solomon’s ransom and that “ ‘some Christians [are] here to stand witness to


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his innocence’ ” (211). The character witnesses must produce their own bona fides, then they attest to their knowledge of Solomon’s character, knowledge that leads them to believe he would not have murdered anyone. The nonappearance of the eye witness and the testimony of Solomon’s social superiors are what get him off. The men who provide judgment are official, yet ad hoc; no one disputes their right to determine Solomon’s fate. In Hubert’s case, when the ring is unearthed in his bag, Rufus and Gaucher claim that it gives them the right to execute Hubert summarily, but matters are complicated by the revelation that Brother James is a converted Jew, kin to Hubert and Eliazar. Hubert’s oath—as a Christian—that he will not try and flee but remain with the group to face Abbot Peter’s judgment is sufficient to defer resolution. Edgar stands surety for him, and the issue is put in abeyance. In this instance as well, Newman shows the very real possibilities for unofficial “justice” and the universal acceptance of the church’s right to pronounce judgment: no one queries the jurisdiction of the Abbot of Cluny over these matters, and it seems self-evident that oaths and bonds are sufficient to keep justice moving forward. The ultimate enactment of justice in Strong as Death comes after Griselle of Lugny is revealed as the killer. The tensions among conflicting versions of justice are made clear; Peter is a lord of the church, but he was raised to be a secular lord, where the structures of justice are rather different. The Lady Griselle understands this well enough to appeal directly to the secular model of vengeance for kin. I see three key features of this adjudication. First, the abbot’s right and responsibility to settle the matter then and there is affirmed. Once she has been caught in the act of her final murder, James goes to report to his abbot; this is not only consistent with earlier proceedings but also emphasizes them because of the greater importance of this case. James’s obedience to his abbot seems natural, but it is interesting that his belief that the Abbot of Cluny “ ‘will need to decide what’s to be done about her’ ” (366) is accepted by all the bystanders. No one argues for sending Griselle home to face justice from the Duke of Burgundy, ruler over her own lands. The abbot could turn her over to a local secular ruler, but decides instead to fight for her soul in his role as “soldier of Christ” (370). Second, Griselle’s justification for her actions impress the assembly as reasonable; she swore an oath to avenge what the knights had done to her husband, Bertran, when he was a child. In carrying out that personal retribution, she is doing something honorable: “Everyone knew that an insult to one’s family must be avenged. How could society exist otherwise?” (372). This characterizes concisely the prevailing concept of justice, including its personal elements. The bystanders and the clerical leaders see the force of her argument, but place more weight on the spiritual aspects of her crimes. That spiritual dimension is the third key feature of the judgment on Lady

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Griselle. She was unwilling to leave the knights’ punishment to the church because she wanted to damn their souls for eternity. She believes sincerely in this aspect of her deeds; that in killing them when they are unshriven, she is enacting an even greater retribution on them than simply ending their lives. She shocks the crowd by asserting plainly that “ ‘[t]hey all had to die, my Lord Abbot, and be damned’ ” (369). The assembly that responded to her reasonableness of the subjects of vengeance for wronged kin and the limitations of secularly administered justice are horrified by her intention to give the knights no hope of heaven. The apparent inconsistencies of this value system are a reflection of different beliefs about justice; the greatest sin she committed in medieval eyes is an element that many twenty-first-century readers would not even acknowledge as real, and even those who would accept its reality would probably not see it as relevant to a judicial inquiry and judgment. Natalie Zemon Davis, in Fiction in the Archives, comments on a successful sixteenth-century appeal for pardon from Senlis in a way that corroborates Newman’s vision of the verdict on Griselle, even though that verdict seems very foreign to the twenty-firstcentury reader. Of the “supplicant” from Senlis who commits murder on Corpus Christi day yet is pardoned, Davis writes that “the archival narrative from Senlis may seem to us stranger than art, but to sixteenth-century judges hearing and verifying it, its ritual frame would have added to its plausibility . . . the ritual setting helped clarify for guilty teller and judging listeners where the day went wrong” (32). Sharan Newman’s emphasis on ritual, including the veneration of relics and the power of pilgrimage, is substantiated by the historical work of scholars such as Davis. Religious belief—and the particular ways in which it is practiced—is another topic Newman takes up through the pilgrimage. I have already discussed several of these examples under other headings, such as the uneasy response to the Jewish religious observances, the belief in the intercession of the saints, and sendings through dreams. This is the world in which medieval women lived, where the presence of the church was inescapable and the details of its beliefs, rituals, and patterns are essential to imagining women’s lives. The veneration of physical objects and relics is another piece of the religious life illustrated in Newman’s series. Relics are central to The Wandering Arm, of course, and readers see how they are used by church leaders in Heresy. For the pilgrims of Strong as Death, they play a more incidental role, but one that suggests how these objects would have functioned for ordinary medieval Christians. Their route is mapped to include a stop at Conques and the relics of Saint Foy. In Catherine’s view, Saint Foy herself took part in the transportation of her remains to Conques, though more cynical voices can be heard as well. Because the abbot of Cluny is in town, the local church powers decide to display the relics.


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Catherine welcomes the opportunity to “ ‘venerate her from as close as possible’ ” (105). The monk who organized the stealing of the relics from their earlier site is depicted on the carved tympanum of the church. Roberto shrewdly remarks that he should have been given greater prominence in light of the prosperity he brought to Conques through his re-siting of the relics, but Catherine rebukes him that the prosperity was possible “ ‘only through the kindness of Saint Foy’ ” (105) whose agency was at work in the move. When they reach Najera and Gaucher tries to reclaim the mysterious treasure the knights had stolen and secreted in the caves, it turns out to be a piece of religious statuary, a three-foot high Virgin and child. Catherine seems to think of the statue as if it is Mary, not simply a carved, richly decorated symbol of her. She tries to intervene in the struggle between Griselle and Gaucher because she cannot bear the thought of them sinning “ ‘with Our Lady watching you. You can’t shame her like that’ ” (361). Catherine puts herself in physical danger, not just with the combatants but also on the cliff face itself, trying to rescue the statue. Brother James recognizes that it is an image, a “ ‘thing of this world, nothing more’ ” (364), but this speech of his is intended to redeem him from earlier sins, to show him as more wise and caring than he seemed to this point in the novel. His judgment, purely factual from a twenty-first-century point of view, is meant to carry special significance: he is willing to value Catherine more than the statue of Mary. Feminist issues are at stake throughout, but are explored specifically through the events that take place on the pilgrimage, and the connections between those events and the backgrounds of the women in the group, especially Catherine, Lady Griselle, and Mondete. Women’s legal relation to property is an aspect of women’s lives that the widowed Griselle can illustrate, and Catherine’s reproductive difficulties are a continuing thread, but most of the issues in this book concern various forms of sexual exploitation of women. The long ago crime that turns out to be the center of present events demonstrates women’s status as sexual objects; even mothers trying to take refuge in a church may be perceived as sexual objects, and brutally assaulted in consequence. Catherine and Edgar’s childlessness is the reason for their pilgrimage, and there are conversations en route that develop context for Catherine’s plight. Griselle, based on her own experience, assumes that Catherine has trouble conceiving, but the truth is perhaps more painful, and certainly more dangerous: she conceives but then must endure miscarriages or difficult labors that end in stillbirths. Their decision to go on the pilgrimage is something readers of the earlier series titles are prepared for. In the very first book, the desperation of childless women who are driven to “consultations” with the hermit Aleran is made very clear, and most of the well-born women who consult him have

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already tried pilgrimages. Catherine’s sister-in-law Marie mentions a woman who made the trip to Santiago de Compostela (184). The third book, The Wandering Arm, includes as an opening scene Catherine’s dangerous, agonizing delivery of a stillborn child. That the next book has Catherine and Edgar making the pilgrimage seems natural after that preparation. Griselle needs her guards not just to protect her from criminals, but from the advances of men interested in her (desirable) body and the financial resources she possesses as a widow. The knights are the main candidates here, and she makes it clear that their attentions are unwelcome. One reason Hubert can serve as an acceptable companion for her en route is his ineligibility to marry her; his wife is still alive, if retired from the world, and equally to the point, he is a merchant. The knights are incensed at his temerity in speaking with her and infuriated by her welcoming reception of him, primarily because of his lower social status, and she herself observes to her maid that Catherine need have no fear of her as future stepmother for this reason. She is a prize, but available only to men of a certain social standing. Her beauty makes her an object to be coveted, but only in conjunction with her financial assets: “Hugh of Grignon was not interested in joining the chase for the person and property of Griselle of Lugny” (102). Gaucher expresses this even more forcefully when he says “ ‘I hate widows. . . .Give them control of a bit of property and they lose all respect’ ” (74). Mondete’s story, of course, is a paradigm of sexual exploitation of women. Essentially sold by her parents to Norbert in early adolescence, Mondete was cast off by him when she became too old to interest him sexually. Having failed to produce children, she received no recompense of any kind, and her parents refused to take her back. She became, inevitably, the town whore. Newman’s use of supporting epigraphs, discussed earlier, and Mondete’s past experiences give weight to her pronouncements during the pilgrimage itself. Hersent contributes to this theme as well, bringing logic to traditional romantic tales concerning women.14 More general tendencies to disregard women’s humanity are demonstrated throughout the book. Catherine’s struggle to be taken seriously as an educated woman who is entitled to express opinions shows all the kinds of resistance she faces: from clerics, from the Jewish merchants, from scholars, from the all-too-secular knights. Clerics in particular have a tendency to see women as sexual objects, as temptresses always ready to draw decent men from their rightful path. The decision taken by Abott Peter is set up cleverly to emphasize this. When the problem of a murdered pilgrim is brought to him, he considers the situation from both sides—that of the pilgrims and that of his own entourage—before deciding whether to permit


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closer contact between the two groups. Newman plays on the readers’ expectations, first suggesting that he is concerned for the safety of the more vulnerable members of the pilgrim group but then revealing that he sees them as the problem: “ ‘There are several women in that group,’ he said at last. ‘More than usual and younger than usual. I will need some sort of guarantee that they not be allowed to wander among the monks or lay brothers. If they swear to that, tell the pilgrims they may camp within the circle of our guards’ ” (115). Contemporary Contexts Those writers who choose the medieval period face particularly difficult challenges. The limited quantity of material on women, and the difficulty of interpreting what is available, make the research a challenge; accommodating the needs of twenty-first-century readers while not distorting the historical record makes the writing even harder than it is for the other authors analyzed in this study. For the medieval period, there is a limited amount of material available for those who want to research the famous and powerful; the task facing these feminist historical crime writers is even more difficult, for several reasons. First, the kinds of people they have chosen to write about—particularly women, but also Jews and “foreigners” in medieval cities like Paris and York—were not well represented in the primary documentation to begin with; some records that did exist were subsequently destroyed deliberately, and the chasm between those who decided what was important enough to be recorded and the insignificant or problematic groups we are talking about here make interpretation doubly difficult. And yet one of the rewards for those who read these series is not just the insight gained about medieval cultures and women’s places in those cultures, but preparation for unexpected incursions of the medieval into contemporary society. Two examples will suffice. Sharan Newman’s The Wandering Arm was published in 1995, and one of its achievements is to teach readers about medieval attitude toward relics. Her presentation is made convincing through some of the devices I have described above; when I first read the novel, it seemed an authentic re-creation of something remote. Then, in the fall of 1999, the relics of Thérèse of Lisieux toured the United States and the news coverage reflected the kinds of attitudes and behaviors demonstrated in Newman’s books. Here is part of the description of the tour from catholicpilgrims.com: The contents of a gilded wooden box covered with plexiglass, representing about half the remains of Saint Thérèse, had been travelling the world for

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about three years. The other half of her bones remained in France. Travelling from church to monastery, she would rest at the altar as countless thousands came to pass in front of her, touching or kissing the reliquary’s cover. In St. Patrick’s cathedral in New York, all-night vigils were held. At one such celebration in St. Thomas Aquinas church in Brooklyn, a crowd of worshippers stood in the street for several hours as the bishop’s mass was broadcast over loudspeakers. Finally inside, the eager masses were able to pass single file by the reliquary in a line that continued for hours without break. (“Relics”)

The plexiglass, the loudspeakers, the online source of this article (which also reproduces the commemorative cards distributed “to those who came to venerate the remains”): all these are twentieth-century elements, but the rest could be straight out of Catherine LeVendeur’s world. I do not believe that the parallels are due to anachronistic representation by Newman, but rather that they show how under the surface of our apparently sophisticated, cynical society, the medieval can linger on, particularly in church contexts. My other example of a contemporary resurgence of a medieval institution relates to Candace Robb’s series, set in York. In 2003, the dean of the York Minster announced the introduction of an entry charge for visitors to the Minster and the closing of the library. The Minster is the largest Gothic cathedral in northern Europe and its windows contain half of the medieval stained glass surviving in England. The library’s holdings are extraordinary, particularly in its medieval archival material; one of its librarians was Alcuin, confidant of Charlemagne (around 770). Coverage of the story referred to places and customs familiar to readers of Robb’s Owen Archer series, since Archer works for John Thoresby, Archbishop of York (1352–73) on cases that involved church administration. Again, the contemporary historical crime series turns out to be preparation for understanding recent developments in a medieval institution. Even more than that, the political developments of the struggle exposed the medieval underpinnings of the institution; that is, the church is not simply a tradition that continues from the Middle Ages, but it retains some rules and structures that are explicitly medieval. The Daily Telegraph’s coverage underscored this fact in its reporting on the man who currently occupies Thoresby’s post: The Archbishop of York is planning to invoke 1,400-year-old powers to block the introduction of entry charges at York Minster, which were announced by the Dean last month. Dr David Hope, the second most powerful figure in the Church of England, is so angry at the decisions to introduce charges and to close the Minster library that he intends to exercise his “Visitatorial Rights”—a privilege which dates from the 6th century. The Archbishop of York is required to make his visit in full episcopal regalia,


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complete with purple cassock, mitre and crosier. The power, which is thought never to have been exercised, would enable Dr Hope to enter York Minster accompanied by a High Court Judge and a financial adviser to conduct an independent investigation into the management of the Minster. He could then issue a report instructing the Dean how to manage the Minster’s accounts, allowing him to block the proposed charges. (E. Day)

The theatrical nature of this move, and the explicitly medieval basis of its authority, highlight the continuity between then and now; it is not simply the cathedral itself, or its archival holdings, that come from the Middle Ages. The kinds of political maneuvering Robb shows among the church hierarchy—and its connections to the king’s government—are consonant with the style of fighting between the present Archbishop and Dean. Even the fact that the Dean chose the time of his retirement to put these changes in place seems positively contemporary yet convincingly medieval as well. Robb, Frazer, and Newman see those connections and they prepare readers to see them as well. Newman drew on the millennial hysteria—planes will fall from the sky! toilets won’t flush!—as a model for the medieval response to waves of heresy charges. As she says, “our credulity hasn’t changed over the past thousand years, only the focus of our fears” (Heresy 349). Sharan Newman’s Catherine LeVendeur series accurately conveys a circumstantial portrait of life in the Middle Ages for women and other disenfranchised groups. In its emphasis on these marginalized categories, the series is very contemporary, but Newman’s academic credentials and extensive research ensure verisimilitude in presentation of the medieval milieu. In focusing on these marginalized groups, Newman, like most of the other writers in this study, is drawing on the most up-to-date research; she is not rehearsing stale history, but is providing access to the best of recent historical knowledge. The major achievement of this series is to capture a very alien worldview, one in which religion is central to people’s daily lives. Through plots that are structured around the routine of life in a convent or the experience of a religious pilgrimage, Newman validates the emphasis on the religious patterning of people’s lives during this period. While Robb’s sleuth works for the Archbishop of York, and Frazer’s is a Benedictine nun, it is Newman’s pair of failed religieuse who most consistently reveal the centrality of religious belief in this culture. When Sister Frevisse leaves the convent, she often finds herself investigating crimes that have nothing to do with spirituality and everything to do with worldly matters, greed, and ambition. Every book in Newman’s series revolves around a central religious fact, and all of the characters are conscious of their spiritual condition. Books that focus on heresy, relics, and pilgrimages are clearly religion centered, but even a less obvious candidate like Cursed

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in the Blood has a religious center upon inspection. (In this novel, even those who are not concerned about the state of their salvation, like Waldeve, are caught up in an ecclesiastical battle, and final justice is meted out by the institutions of the church.) Incorporating details of housekeeping, childbirth, and the care of young children alongside portraits of women—both historical and fictional—who exercise power, Newman give readers new insight into women’s historical roles without violating the fundamentally religious basis of medieval life. Her dynamic use of paratexts substantiates her presentation of a remote time and place. Epigraphs, historical figures, and ritual frames all corroborate Newman’s scholarship while adding to readers’ enjoyment of her mystery novels and providing inspiration for women’s agency.

CHAPTER 3 LEGAL VIOLENCE IN MID-NINETEENTHCENTURY AMERICA

That men . . . were not prevented by courts or clergy from mistreating their wives meant that, to society’s institutions, women . . . had no value. A man could be jailed, even hanged, for stealing another man’s horse, but not even reproached for beating his wife. So why should the result be surprising? Miriam Grace Monfredo, Through a Gold Eagle

iriam Grace Monfredo is one of the most important American writers of historical crime fiction. Her Glynis Tryon series has been described as “part of a thoughtfully planned body of work to tell the story of minority and women’s rights” (Heising 140). Along with Sharan Newman, she coedited the short story collections Crime Through Time (1997) and Crime Through Time II (1998), thereby influencing the shape of the subgenre. Throughout the 1990s she was in demand as a public speaker for audiences including women’s groups, universities, public library programs across the country, and historical societies; she was a featured speaker for several events in Seneca Falls, New York, at the National Women’s Hall of Fame, the Seneca Falls Historical Society, and the National Park. Monfredo is one of the featured authors in Bertens and D’haen’s chapter on historical crime fiction, described by them as one of “the more successful exponents of the genre” (148). Furthermore, they note, “the female voice comes through very strongly in Seneca Falls Inheritance, and in Monfredo’s entire Glynis Tryon series” (155). Her background includes degrees in history and library/information science; in addition to her writing and public speaking, she is the director of a legal and historical research firm. One strength of the Glynis Tryon series is Monfredo’s brilliant use of the crime plot’s potential to embody the consequences of the social and legal codes that denigrate women; historical information and feminist

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analysis are integral to the crime plots, not supplemental to them. Bertens and D’haen also see this as one of Monfredo’s strengths: “One of the strong points of Seneca Falls Inheritance is how the Woman’s Rights Convention, and the historical conditions of women in the mid-nineteenth century, meaningfully inform the crime plot” (156). Furthermore, Monfredo’s series looks explicitly at how the framework provided by the legislative and judicial codes of her chosen setting—mid-nineteenth-century America— impact women. Monfredo’s novels remind readers that resolution in crime fiction usually depends upon the law; working within that tradition, Monfredo is called upon to seek solutions within the system, to look for justice as the result of properly functioning legal and social systems. Information gathered, whether by the official representatives of the law or by amateurs, is turned over to the authorities. Though her novels clearly respect that tradition, they also point out two important limitations to its efficacy. First, much of the conduct described in her novels that is now illegal (or at least seems reprehensible) was, at the time, not only legal but also a widely accepted norm; the irony of this is developed in significant ways in a novel like North Star Conspiracy, where the enforcement of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act is central to Monfredo’s plot. Furthermore, her novels make clear the judicial system’s limited ability to contain violence, and I want to use René Girard’s theoretical model as an essential tool for analyzing this aspect of Monfredo’s achievement. There are some complications in using Girard for feminist analysis. Among them is Girard’s own disinclination to engage feminist issues, or even to use non-sexist language. All we read of in Girard’s work are “men.” That the term “men” does not include both men and women is demonstrated elegantly by the Seneca Falls Convention’s Declaration of Sentiments. Its striking assertion that “we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal” emphasizes the exclusion of women from the original Declaration. Indeed, if the world of novels is made up of “men and things” (Deceit, Desire and the Novel 216), then women must be “things.” Too often, women are seen in merely functional terms, for the “things” they are or the purposes they serve.1 Yet those who are certain that Girard’s theory has nothing to offer feminists sometimes offer unconvincing, out-of-hand rejections of its potential. For example, Teresa deLauretis reads Violence and the Sacred as being exclusively about men based on a rigid (and perhaps oversimplified) series of steps. Girard’s concept of reciprocity, in her view, ensures equality and thus maleness.2 She sees Girard and others as working “within an epistemology wherein ‘biological’ sexual difference is the ground (in Peirce’s term) of gender. In that perspective, woman remains outside of history” (252–53). I will show later in this chapter how it is possible to consider women as players in these reciprocal relationships.

LEGAL VIOLENCE IN AMERICA

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It is certain, however, that Girard’s model of the judiciary’s functioning, as he describes it in Violence and the Sacred, depends upon an equality that whole segments of the society Monfredo is depicting do not in fact enjoy: “The judicial authority is beholden to no one. It is thus at the disposal of everyone” (23). If women cannot own property, enter into contracts, or sit on juries, in what sense is the law at their disposal? Monfredo’s exploration of these questions takes its place alongside Girard’s explanation of the legal system’s proper functioning; if his theory reveals how it works when all are enfranchised, her fiction suggests some of the consequences that result from the presence of disenfranchised subjects. To put Monfredo’s plot achievements in context, I want to briefly consider two series that would seem to invite comparison with Monfredo’s: Ann McMillan’s, set in civil war–era Virginia, and Margaret Lawrence’s, set in late eighteenth-century Maine. After that, the chapter’s analysis of Monfredo’s work has three main foci: Monfredo’s use of crime plotting, her presentation of the laws of this period, and her representation of the courts at work. Her first novel, Seneca Falls Inheritance, is my primary text under each of these three headings. Ann McMillan’s historical crime series features a trio of investigators: the young white widow, Narcissa Powers; former slave and healer, Judah Daniel; and British journalist Brit Wallace. Having this trio of outsiders as an investigative team allows McMillan to examine a range of issues, and each character confronts the specific ways he or she is disenfranchised and/or empowered by Richmond society. The books are well researched and informative, and events in Richmond are placed into the civil war context neatly, particularly through the travels of Brit Wallace who is there specifically to cover the war. Dead March and Civil Blood provide a circumstantial depiction of contemporary medical training—including the gruesome business of finding cadavers for students—and the kinds of treatments then available. Civil Blood includes detailed information about smallpox. Margaret Lawrence’s first novel featuring Hannah Trevor, a midwife in 1786 Rufford, Maine, was nominated for several major crime awards, including the Agatha and Edgar awards for best novel. With its strong female protagonist and its vivid evocation of the injustices rampant in early America, Lawrence’s three-book series might also be compared to Monfredo’s.3 Both series provide salutary reminders to readers of just how young a country the United States is, and how inconsistently new civic and judicial institutions were developed. Lawrence’s books include information about the historical context used (an Afterword in the first book, followed by a Historical Note in the second, and both an Author’s Note and Acknowledgments in the third), and she focuses directly on the disenfranchised: women, children, the poor, those who are physically different in

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some way (e.g., deaf or crippled). In fact, Lawrence’s series make stunningly literal what it means to be disenfranchised, to be voiceless, to suffer for having views that are politically incorrect: these tired phrases of our victim-conscious society are vigorously made manifest in Hannah Trevor’s world. And yet neither series can match the achievement of Monfredo’s. McMillan casts her net wider in each book, particularly through the three main investigative characters, and depth is sometimes sacrificed for breadth. While it is true that Brit Wallace identifies himself as an outsider each time he speaks, his disadvantages pale in comparison with Narcissa’s and Judah’s; yet the novels present them as equal but different in their outsider status. In contrast, Monfredo’s series tends to develop her analysis of other disenfranchised groups (Indians, slaves, free blacks, indentured servants, and Jews) at length in one book, alongside her feminist history. The major difference, though, rests in their use of crime plots. Monfredo’s plots work together with her feminist history, narrativizing the consequences of the laws, beliefs, and attitudes she depicts. McMillan’s plots tend toward the sentimental and undercut any overtly declared feminism. Narcissa’s sister-in-law, Mirrie Powers, is an outspoken single woman, the daughter of an elderly professor. And yet she has a beau, Nat Cohen, with whom she has a sentimental relationship. Her “flurried eagerness” (Angel Trumpet 131) over Cohen makes her principles seem temporary; all she needs is a good man! Monfredo’s Glynis Tryon, by contrast, follows a principled stance against marriage; although it is painful to turn down Cullen Stuart’s proposal and endure the subsequent complications in their friendship, Glynis is certain that marriage—even to the best of men—limits and demeans women.4 McMillan’s first book, Dead March, includes some important material on puerperal fever, but one of its victims turns out to be the criminal: Dr. Hughes’s wife, Rachel, loses her sanity when her twins are lost to that infection. Reading up on theories of how the infection spreads, she uses her knowledge to kill Narcissa’s brother and the slave her husband has impregnated, and attempts to murder Narcissa as well. The central paradox, as Dr. Hughes explains in his murder/suicide note, is that Rachel Hughes demonstrated “the observation of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Not only can puerperal fever be passed between doctor and patient, but the fever can be passed in different forms—gangrene, erysipelas, puerperal fever, may all be forms of the same hideous contagion. What had been done by me in ignorance, by carrying the infection on my hands and clothes, she did deliberately by tainting bandages with the effluvia of disease” (293). So McMillan’s female character uses her knowledge destructively; she is an object lesson for nineteenth-century views on how dangerous it would be for women to have scientific knowledge. In Angel Trumpet the criminal is Gerard Lucien, an avaricious man who passes himself off alternately as a French aristocrat and a former slave (he is


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in fact the descendant of slaves). After manipulating the slaves into killing the inhabitants of the Big House, he continues working toward his “treasure” through a manipulative and silly young woman, Jordan Archer. At the end of the novel, the runaway slaves who inhabit the swamp string him up “where the white folks could see him, so they would not need to come looking for him in the swamp” (205). This resolution undermines McMillan’s sympathetic portrayal of society’s outsiders; furthermore, the female characters are almost all negatively portrayed, including the vindictive Mrs. Cantrell who seems “evil” (56) to Narcissa, and Mrs. Jennings. Even the old family story behind the present-day events sends the message that women are selfishly immoral, irrational, and destructive. It is revealed that Eulalie Archer was having an affair with her brother-in-law. When they made plans to run off together, her sister, Caroline Archer Jennings, pushed her down the stairs, causing a miscarriage, let her bleed to death, and then bashed in her husband’s skull. In Civil Blood, society woman Aurelia Harrald is the criminal, deliberately infecting people with smallpox, stabbing and shooting others. At the conclusion, she seems crazed, giggling and raving. Doctor Cameron Archer, in explaining some of Aurelia’s history to Narcissa, observes that she was “ ‘desperate . . . to get away from that terrible family’ ” and that although a member of a wealthy family, “ ‘Aurelia lived the life of a prisoner’ ” (188). Here again, even though one could imagine using her life to illustrate women’s subjugation, the plot developments rule out sympathy. Compared to Monfredo and McMillan, Lawrence’s prose tends to the purple, and the relentless descriptions of violence and cruelty become numbing. How Hannah Trevor’s lover, Daniel Josselyn, remains alive after the number of times readers see him being stabbed, shot, beaten, burned, is a mystery in itself. But the main reason that Lawrence’s books, in spite of their strengths, do not belong alongside Monfredo’s, is in their plotting. I called Hannah Trevor the protagonist rather than the sleuth deliberately; the events of the novels unfold, but Hannah is not an active investigator (either official or unofficial) and she learns alongside the reader. This is related to the fact that each killer is insane; the normal process of investigation for an amateur sleuth would be fruitless. Each novel begins with a luridly titled prologue, where readers see the killer at work and learn about the roots of his or her insanity.5 For Lawrence, the point to be made is that people can be driven insane by their own sufferings and then turn to violence themselves. I agree with Bertens and D’haen, who describe the first novel in the series as “historically accurate . . . particularly with regard to women” but express a serious reservation: “at the same time the novel is very contemporary in its psychology” (154). Hannah Trevor expresses a contemporary viewpoint in old-fashioned language when she says of Merriam, the killer in Blood Red Roses, “ ‘she is the weapon the world has made of

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her, and now it says she has too sharp an edge! Was the lash mad that cut her?’ ” (351). The heterodiegetic narration follows up Hannah’s comment by observing that there are many kinds of murderers. Some kill for money, some for fear, some for jealousy. Very few see their crimes and plan them carefully in advance. Most, like the woman called Merriam, are taken unawares by a specific fury, like sky in the landscape of their souls that is barely noticed except in the throes of a storm; they live quietly enough until chance springs it shut like a trap upon them, their heels kicking, their fists striking out at the sky. (352)

Such an approach to crime fiction rules out the kind of corroboration Monfredo’s crime plots provide for her feminist analysis; Monfredo builds into her plots the criminal’s reasons and opportunities as a means of demonstrating directly her knowledge of women’s place in this society. When Lawrence says in the Afterword to Hearts and Bones that “it is not so much that the past is dead, as that we are not alive enough to reach it” (328), she testifies to her allegiance to a view of history that is unlikely to provoke the impulse for women’s agency. Crime Plots and Feminist Themes In her first book, Seneca Falls Inheritance (1992), Monfredo offers a theory for the reduction of violence against women: provide women with complete legal equality. The context for her theory is 1848, but the principle is by no means irrelevant 150 years later. The novel illustrates the belief that scattered individual rights are insufficient, even dangerous: in a society orchestrated against women, any identifiable powers are perceived as a threat by the fully enfranchised. Indeed, when Rose Walker dares plan to exercise the newly granted right to her own inherited property, she is murdered. With even limited control over her own property, she is worth more dead than alive to her husband, accustomed as he is to complete power over her person and her assets. What is the Seneca Falls inheritance? In Monfredo’s plot, the inheritance is a literal one and the trigger for the first murder in the book: Rose Walker learns, after his death, of her father’s identity and the large inheritance to which she is entitled. She travels to meet the heir apparent, her half-brother Karl who is now running their father’s farm in Seneca Falls, New York. She wants to make known both herself (as his half-sister) and her legitimate claim to half of their late father’s estate. She is repudiated by Karl and then murdered by her ne’er do well husband, Gordon Walker, who has his own plans for the inheritance. Two more victims follow, both perceived by the killer


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as dangerous witnesses: the first, a prostitute at Seneca Falls’ tavern/brothel who knows he was in town the night of his wife’s murder, and the second, a local alcoholic who steals Rose Walker’s handbag after the murder. The crime is eventually disentangled through the good sense and woman’s perspective of Glynis Tryon, the town’s librarian; her friendship with local law enforcement—in the persons of the town constable and its leading attorney—allows her to contribute to the discovery process. Rose Walker is the victim, not the perpetrator, but this brief summary of the novel’s plot suggests some congruence with Natalie Zemon Davis’s observations about the ways in which women’s letters of remission differ from men’s. A fundamental difference concerns the reasons they were permitted to give for their actions: “somewhat removed by cultural assumptions and/or by their own choices from the acceptable legal excuses of impulse (hot anger, drunkenness), women were either silent about their feelings or many-tongued” (Archives 103). But another crucial difference is that social rank means less—in terms of the narrative being constructed— than gender. As Davis summarizes, interestingly enough, the women’s supplications do not cohere as often as do the men’s around a scenario of occupation or estate. There are Washerwomen’s Tales . . . there are Mistresses’ Tales . . . and there are Servant’s Tales. . . . But especially there are Wives’ Tales and Widows’ Tales, where gender rather than social rank sets the stage. Or rather a gender role constitutes the woman’s estate, and her account sweeps the facts of work and place into a narrative carried by themes of family, sexual honor, and inheritance. (87–88)

It is suggestive that the predominant gender-dictated themes for sixteenthcentury French women’s appeals for mercy can be so neatly encapsulated in Monfredo’s story of mid-nineteenth-century America. Further underscoring the primacy of gender in determining events is the means by which Glynis Tryon reads the clues available to her: like a woman. In fact, one of the satisfactions for readers of Seneca Falls Inheritance is that the Trifles truth-finding mechanism, which I explored in my introduction, is visible twice: first, for readers who are already attuned to it, and then a second time, in the public exposition of the facts that Glynis provides in the trial and among the principals later.6 When the town Constable, Cullen Stuart, asks Glynis to look through Rose Walker’s belongings at the hotel–a suitable task for a woman—she notices not only that there are too many clothes for a brief trip to outstate New York, but the wrong kind of clothes for the weather. Why bring a fur-trimmed cape and muff? The jewelry on deposit in the hotel vault seems similarly extravagant for the brief stay Rose Walker is presumed to be making. Further, Glynis finds

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railroad ticket stubs from Rose Walker’s journey to Seneca Falls, but no return tickets. Later, at novel’s end, she explains the significance of these findings to the court that would be incapable of understanding them without an interpreter. Walker’s lawyer tries to suppress her testimony on the grounds that she is not “a qualified expert” in these matters; ironically, this attempt signals her efficacy as interpreter. Rose Walker’s belongings demonstrated, to those capable of reading their message, that she was not making a brief visit to western New York, as her husband claimed, but was in fact leaving him and Boston permanently behind her. While Trifles is a dramatic adaptation of a murder and Seneca Falls Inheritance is wholly fictional, consequential female attention to apparent trivia played a role in an 1832 New England murder investigation. Sarah Maria Cornell, a Massachusetts mill worker of good family was found murdered in December 1832; the following winter, Ephraim Avery, Methodist minister, was acquitted. The Cornell murder case not only provides invaluable points of comparison to Monfredo’s historical fiction set in the following decades, but it also provides a larger set of perspectives on crime narratives and reinterpretation of historical crimes. In addition to numerous books and articles published in the aftermath of the crime (some by those directly involved in the case), there have been historical studies and fictional re-tellings of the case.7 One specific feature of the crime’s resolution merits consideration here, as a means of underscoring the validity of Monfredo’s approach. After Cornell’s body is found, some “respectable matrons” (Williams 25) were asked to tend to the corpse. This necessitates going through her belongings at her rented room, looking for information about her relations and gathering suitable clothes for burial. Williams’s “authentic narrative” provides a dramatic bit of storytelling that evokes Trifles, and Glynis with Rose Walker’s possessions: Near the middle of the bandbox lay a small piece of soiled paper and a lead pencil. Mr. Durfee did not open the little piece of paper or think of its being of any consequence whatever. Two of the women, on rummaging the bandbox late in the afternoon, in hope by some means to discover where to direct a letter to her friends, chanced to observe this very piece of paper, which, though very small, soiled, and looking like waste paper, they unfolded and read. It contained these words—“If I am missing enquire of the Rev. E. K. Avery. S.M.C.” (27)

Later, after a piece of Cornell’s broken comb is found in a location that indicates a struggle, Mr. Durfee takes the two main pieces of evidence, the comb and “the piece of paper found in the bandbox” to the coroner to call for an investigation (29). The desire to see a suicide rather than a murder is


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exploded by these two trifles, and Avery comes under investigation through the note. What resonates in the passage from Williams is her pleasure in the “trifling” nature of this evidence and the female agency involved in its discovery. Like those men would do nearly one hundred years later in Glaspell’s play, the male official looks at a vital clue and finds it of no consequence; the women’s willingness to look at trifles, even those that are “very small, soiled, and looking like waste paper,” uncovers a vital clue. Though Glaspell’s characters choose not to share their knowledge of the woman’s motivations for murder with the investigating men, these Fall River matrons did pass on the evidence pointing to the Reverend Avery’s guilt: the irony, perhaps inevitable, is that the man accused in the note is exonerated by the judicial system. Our Seneca Falls inheritance is also much larger and more enduring than the fictional drama enacted in Seneca Falls Inheritance, as Monfredo is at pains to remind readers through other characters and the historical information she includes. The Methodist Church in Seneca Falls was the site of the 1848 Woman’s Rights Convention, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and attended by such famous figures as Lucretia Mott and Frederick Douglass. At the time of the convention, Susan B. Anthony was a teacher and member of the temperance reform movement; she read of the convention and its audacious Declaration of Sentiments, which was based upon the Declaration of Independence but inclusive of women. A few years later, she joined with Cady Stanton and the two of them laid the groundwork for the passage of U.S. women’s suffrage in August 1920. In the broader sense, then, our inheritance from Seneca Falls is immense and continuing. The novel reminds readers of its larger context in several ways. Elizabeth Cady Stanton is one of its characters, a friend of Glynis Tryon’s, and she provides important information about Rose Walker’s family and appears during the trial at novel’s end. Monfredo’s historical notes before and after the primary text provide information about the convention, its famous participants, and other related events of the period. In the denouement, a classic clue-puzzle scene where all is explained, Glynis reflects on the Seneca Falls inheritance: when asked what made her suspect Walker, she answers “ ‘It was the convention.’ ” (276). She elucidates an awareness of the potential import of their convention: “ ‘I sat in the Wesleyan Chapel wondering just what we women had started. What we would be leaving the next generation. . . . Would what they inherited be a benefit to them as we hoped—or a loss for some that we couldn’t foresee?’ ” (276). In her intuition that the consequences of this positive move could be negative for some of those women it was designed to aid and support, Glynis arrives at an understanding of the sacrificial crisis the women are provoking.

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Nineteenth-century America is a society built around a rigidly demarcated system of differences; into that “regulated system of distinctions in which the differences among individuals are used to establish their ‘identity’ and their mutual relationships” these women are introducing a very real “crisis of distinctions” (Violence and the Sacred 49). Violence is inevitable, and the events of Seneca Falls Inheritance embody the logical consequences of erasing one difference and calling for the eradication of others. Sometimes supplying the larger context is a matter of shifting the emphasis in an unusual direction, or of directing readers’ attention to unexamined aspects of a known story. Monfredo’s series provides many examples of these methods, but two will suffice. Monfredo puts the John Brown story to interesting use in Through a Gold Eagle.8 The story of Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry is general knowledge, and Monfredo does not spend a lot of time rehearsing the events. The raid itself takes place off stage; the novel goes from Annie Brown on the eve of the raid in chapter 20 to Glynis Tryon reading the newspaper reports of the attack in the subsequent chapter. What Monfredo does with the story is to consider the political influences at work behind Brown’s ill-fated plan—who contributed money? and why?—and to sketch in Brown’s family. The public Brown, whom Glynis observes speaking and fund-raising at the Stanton’s house in Seneca Falls, is contrasted vividly with the domestic Brown, who has twenty children (seven with his first wife, and thirteen with the second) yet cares far more for his cause than the well-being of his family. His ill-conceived schemes have resulted in the death or destruction of several sons already, but as he plans for Harpers Ferry he fights bitterly against those sons who refuse to take part. The women of the family, particularly his exhausted and exploited second wife, Mary Anne, and daughter Annie, are sketched in terms that emphasize Brown’s indifference to his family’s needs. Their historical voices speak directly through the chapter epigraphs; three from Annie Brown, one from her father about her, and one from John Henry Kagi, one of those killed in the raid. These epigraphs provide support for Monfredo’s depiction of Annie’s role in the Brown ménage. The “invisible” Annie’s life has been one of privation: “She had wanted to go to school, pleaded to go, but Father had said no, she was needed at home to take care of the younger children. She had wanted, just one time, to have a new dress that was all her own, not a worn hand-me-down, but there was never even enough money for food” (205). When she sets out for her housekeeping duties in Virginia, she owns no shoes: in a classic feminist trope, her mother’s secret cache of egg money, “collected over more than two years’ time” (206) is enough to buy her a pair of second-hand shoes. In the novel’s epilogue, we see Annie back home in the New York mountains wearing those same shoes. The structure of this very short chapter emphasizes


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Annie’s separation from the political implications of her father’s plans. While a quotation from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow celebrates the coming “whirlwind” made inevitable by the events of Harpers Ferry, Annie Brown has gained nothing, only lost family, friends, and the limited financial resources available earlier. She is alone and unconsoled. Monfredo’s most recent novels, the civil war trilogy featuring Glynis Tryon’s nieces, Bronwen and Kathryn Llyr, are less committed to developing feminist themes, partly because they are so focused on the political, military, and intelligence aspects of the Virginia Peninsula Campaign of 1862.9 Bronwen’s role as treasury agent and Kathryn’s as nurse do provide opportunity for feminist commentary, however. Throughout the trilogy, Monfredo includes examples of the resistance to women nurses. In the first novel, Sisters of Cain, she shows the climate in which someone like Kathryn Llyr would be seeking work. Her training is substantial, and includes hospital experience. She has references from doctors, male and female, but is met with skepticism at every turn. Her interview with Dorothea Dix allows Monfredo to show readers how women themselves conspired to keep women from new opportunities. The chapter of Kathryn’s interview opens with an epigraph from Dix, and includes an extract from Dix’ s guidelines for nurses: “No woman under thirty need apply to serve in government hospitals. All nurses are required to be plain looking women. Their dresses must be brown or black, with no bows, no curls, no jewelry, and no hoopskirts” (140). The historical note on Dix at the end of the book provides further information about Dix’s career and about women’s role as nurses: “at the beginning of the war there were no recognized, professional female nurses in America; by the war’s end, approximately twenty percent of the nurses were women” (361). Kathryn has better luck with Frederick Olmstead at the Sanitary Commission, but that is a voluntary organization; it takes a few plot twists to get Kathryn serving as a paid nurse for the military, and her circumstances are clearly unusual (275). Monfredo also piggybacks onto the subject information about Florence Nightingale and a tribute to Anne Perry’s fictional nurse, Hester Latterly, whom Dr. Travis mentions meeting in the Crimea (316). Without distorting the facts, Monfredo’s carefully constructed plots allow her to show readers a re-focused portrait of some historical events of which they already have knowledge, like John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid or women’s roles in the civil war. Legislation Part of Monfredo’s achievement is the work she does with actual legislation of her period. Crimes not only have a moral, or ethical, dimension, but they are also committed in a specific legal context. Monfredo challenges

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her readers to think about the implications of changing legislation by linking some of the crimes committed by her characters to the legislation that governs these crimes. After the mysteries are solved, she goes on to present the specific contexts that govern the prosecution of the offenders; that is the next section of this chapter. Here, I want to look at three examples of how Monfredo presents not just crimes, but the laws that designate those activities as criminal. First, and most briefly, I consider counterfeiting in Through a Gold Eagle. This example is the most straightforward, as the crime committed is illegal to all eyes. Monfredo’s development of the 1859 legislation concerning counterfeiting and banking law adds nuances and shows how legislation adapts to meet a particular set of needs. The second example is from North Star Conspiracy, where Monfredo looks hard at the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Here, the conflict arises from the difference between what is legal (the return of slaves to their owners in the south) and what is now seen as moral and ethical. My third and final example is the 1848 New York State Married Women’s Property Act, a piece of legislation that conferred a limited and long-overdue right on a deserving group; but the result in Seneca Falls Inheritance is not what one might expect. The most straightforward of my three examples is the counterfeiting activities in Through a Gold Eagle. The counterfeiters commit other crimes, murder among them, but their criminal activities are predicated on weak banking laws. Readers are given historical background on American coins from the Revolutionary period in the Historical Notes, and Glynis learns alongside readers about the political dimensions of bank regulation. When Andrew Jackson vetoed the reauthorization of a national bank, opportunities were created for all kinds of fraud; as Cullen explains to Glynis, “ ‘there are no federal requirements for setting up a bank, and no reserve funds are necessary . . . anybody can open a bank’ ” (80). Bank regulation is a state matter, and one example of the New York State Legislature’s attempt to reduce counterfeiting is cited as the epigraph to chapter 16. Because the simplest method of counterfeiting was to produce bogus banknotes on banks that had closed, the Legislature required the prompt destruction of the note plates upon a bank’s closure. Banknotes were presented to a bank for conversion into “real” money—gold coins, for example—and any bank that exchanged fake notes would be out that sum. The financial structures in place during this period encouraged a particular type of fraud; legislation was enacted to eliminate that precise type of fraud, and law enforcement procedures were similarly tailored to it as lists of closed banks with destroyed plates were circulated. Crime fiction’s requirements for circumstantial detail means that even in a straightforward example like this one, Monfredo’s readers are learning about the legal context for counterfeiters of the 1850s and not simply asked to recognize counterfeiting as a crime.


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North Star Conspiracy takes up an even more interesting legal situation with the Fugitive Slave Act. After a brief prologue, the present-time narrative begins in February 1854, with Glynis returning from Albany with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton’s address to the Legislature, which she made on that trip, is the source for chapter 1 epigraph: “The wife who inherits no property holds about the same legal position that does the slave on the Southern plantation. She can own nothing, sell nothing. She has no rights even to the wages she earns; her person, her time, her service are the property of another” (5). It was Stanton’s work in the abolition movement that opened her eyes to the plight of women, and this kind of connection is a natural one for her to make. Legally, women were disenfranchised, and Monfredo includes some of the mocking newspaper responses to Stanton’s address to the Legislature to underscore the unlikelihood of improvement. Yet by novel’s end Glynis has a clearer perspective on the unique evils of slavery. The legal protections afforded the institution of slavery itself are not Monfredo’s prime target, however, but the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This Act was a strengthening of existing Constitutional language, and came about as part of a compromise involving California’s admission to the United States as the thirty-first state. The Act was unpopular in the North from the beginning, and it created an interesting situation where people not invested in slavery—either materially or ideologically— were forced by the law to support it because anyone who helped fugitives (whether actively, or simply by refusing to assist in their re-capture) was in violation of the U.S. Constitution. The Fugitive Slave Act is what Niles Peartree has violated in helping Kiri to escape the plantation where she was enslaved, and this is the law that Seneca Falls constable Cullen Stuart is sworn to uphold even though he finds it morally repugnant. The political motivations behind the law, and its enforcement, are underscored in the novel and, as the story develops, readers learn about other laws that dictate unjust practices. These pieces of legal reality fit naturally into the tale; my listing them here should not imply an artificial, didactic presentation of these discriminatory laws. Among Monfredo’s examples: all children born of slave mothers, regardless of the father’s status, are themselves slaves (180); until the Richmond Court of Appeals invalidated it in 1853, manumissions could stipulate the freed slave’s departure from his or her home state within a certain period of time or the manumission became invalid (287); it is against the law to teach a slave to read (242); black people cannot testify against white men in court (245, 270). The abuse of power enabled by all of these laws is demonstrated through the novel’s plot, and it serves as a clear reminder— powerful in a crime novel—that legal does not necessarily mean right. The example I want to look at most closely is that found in Seneca Falls Inheritance. On April 8, 1848, the New York State Married Women’s

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Property Act, the first legislation of its kind in the United States, became law. The events of the novel begin in June, so Rose Walker would have been one of the very first to avail herself of its protection. The Act granted women some power over their own property, superseding a situation where husbands could dispose of their wives’ property however they chose. The existence of that law puts Rose Walker in danger from her husband, as he decides he must kill her to take possession of her inheritance. She becomes a murder victim for two reasons: one practical and one metaphysical. First, as someone who owns property, she has become valuable enough to kill; formerly, as Walker’s property, with no means of controlling either her money or his behavior, she was harmless. The other change precipitated by this legislation is a new relationship with her husband: they have become susceptible to mimetic entanglement, something not possible when she was his property and not herself a property owner. Monfredo’s novel shows readers that the 1848 Act is not enough, by itself, to provide women with control of their property. Glynis’s explanation, in response to Rose Walker’s request for information, emphasizes the Act’s limitations even more than the rights it confers. Because women lack civic autonomy—they cannot make contracts, or even keep their own wages— they can only benefit from this new law under a limited set of circumstances. Glynis’s explanation highlights women’s exclusion from existing legal protections: contracts and wages are just two of the areas where women do not benefit by the “proper” functioning of the system. The weakness of women’s position is further emphasized by the male supporters who enabled passage of the bill: the impetus behind its enactment is not abstract justice, but the desire of wealthy fathers to protect their assets from sons-inlaw and businessmen wanting the shelter of their wives’ names to protect assets from creditors. The law, limited as it may be, strikes Glynis in a manner that again raises the issue of inheritance: “ ‘the fact that it passed at all is encouraging to women who are struggling for some of the same legal rights men have. So this law may be more important over the long haul than it now appears’ ” (10). Monfredo’s depiction of the legislation’s background is corroborated by Judith Wellman’s historical explanation of it in The Road to Seneca Falls. Its importance as a turning point was noted by Stanton, Anthony, and Matilda Gage in The History of Woman Suffrage and, as Wellman observes, “so it has seemed to historians. At the time, however, its immediate impact was muted” (154). Monfredo’s use of this law as plot catalyst is insightful—and true to the record. The long haul, while part of American women’s inheritance from 1848 New York, is of no use to Rose Walker. She needs immediate redress. Fully aware of this, she becomes agitated, even frightened, in Glynis’s library. Glynis, and Monfredo’s readers, learn later that Rose has decided


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she cannot wait to talk to Elizabeth Cady Stanton about this new law; instead, she goes to her father’s farm to make a fruitless appeal directly to her half-brother. Later that night, she is called away from her hotel by means of a note and murdered by her husband. Glynis calls attention to the paradox of a legally bestowed right posing a danger to its intended beneficiary: “ ‘I suddenly thought what a terrible irony it would be if that law, designed to protect women, had caused a woman’s murder!’ ” (276). The novel is not endorsing a situation where women are “protected” by being denied adult status, however; its larger agenda shows that nothing less than full equality in the law is required. The change, the newness of her right, contributes to the volatile situation; accustomed to thinking of his wife and her belongings as his property, Walker is infuriated by her newly granted power. Just as she comes into a large inheritance, she also comes into the right to choose what she will do with it; the consequences suggest that one law alone is insufficient protection in a hostile climate. Girard’s model of the modern judicial system can be seen as an expression of a principle of equality yet to be achieved, even now. But his theory of mimetic desire and the potential violence of mimetic relations corroborates Monfredo’s position that a gradual and protracted concession of partial equality to women will only exacerbate the conflict and provoke violence. As the novel demonstrates, mid-nineteenth-century American society is extremely hostile to women, and often downright dangerous. The most obvious victims, of course, are the murdered women—Rose Walker and the tavern prostitute. The latter’s position is especially vulnerable as she lacks even the meager protections afforded her more respectable sisters. This point can be made even more forcefully in North Star Conspiracy, when Glynis confronts the fact “that female slaves might be violated with impunity, without even the doubtful deterrent of legal protection. For if this legal protection was not even available to white married women against rape by their husbands, how much more vulnerable were black slave women?” (68). Much of the violence against women depicted in the pages of Seneca Falls Inheritance, in any case, is fully legal and even socially acceptable. Examples abound; a few will suffice to illustrate the point that for women, nineteenth-century America was a primitive society of ritualized differences. Nell Steicher, Karl’s wife, is financially and social secure, but she is an abject and exhausted wife and mother. Glynis sees her in town and is shocked by her care-worn appearance (23). And yet Nell refuses to attend the convention, citing Bible verses about the need for women’s subordination and silence. At the end of the novel, she is resigned not only to paying what she sees as the price for her husband’s sin against his half-sister but also

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to the facts of life as they stand: “ ‘My mother told me that if I wanted to raise four children, I’d have to bear eight’ ” she tells Glynis (280). The town doctor, aware that Nell has had a stillbirth and a miscarriage, believes it is too soon for her to be having another baby safely but, as Glynis’s mother had told her, “the only way to stop having babies was to die” (159). A character dead before the novel’s events begin is young Annie Monroe: her first delivery is dangerous, but her (male) religious leaders and her husband refuse to let Dr. Ives attend that birth, afraid that he might administer the newly available anesthesia. These men can accept that it is God’s will not only that the breech baby died, but that the mother died a week later from infection and exhaustion (159); no doubt there will be another Mrs. Monroe. Monfredo takes advantage of her historical setting to examine violent attitudes toward women. Another telling example in the novel is Daisy Ross. Her husband, Bobby, ultimately becomes one of Walker’s victims; before that he is a drunken, thieving, violent man. We first see him drunk in the street, after he has been thrown out of the hardware store for making a scene. One of the Steicher’s farm hands, Ross has been found drunk in the fields once too many times and been fired by Karl. Glynis, observing the scene, worries about Daisy and her five children: “the law said Bobby could keep her money and the children, even though he was drunk half the time” (27). The weight of the law is on Bobby’s side; Daisy has no redress at all. Later, shortly before she finds the purse he stole from Rose Walker, there is a scene that shows him physically terrorizing his wife and his frightened children. Daisy Ross, powerless against him, is left only to “hope he dies and goes to hell” (122). I have been describing the concrete ways in which women in Seneca Falls Inheritance are disadvantaged, held down by law and order, but what happens if we think of the characters, male and female, in Seneca Falls Inheritance as antagonists and equals? Girard writes about the reciprocal relationship between characters in tragedy; crime fiction is not Greek drama, to be sure, but its subject matter puts it at least provisionally in the category of tragedy. Of such antagonists, Girard argues that “on both sides everything is equal; not only the desire, the violence, the strategy, but also the alternation of victory and defeat, of exaltation and despair” (Violence and the Sacred 158). Seen in this way, Gordon Walker is simply one agent in the struggle; he is the law breaker whose interests coincide with the many (male) law observers and upholders. The rivalry automatically established by the inheritance is between the half-siblings Rose and Karl; when Walker kills Rose, he does not take her place in the rivalry, for the court is deciding whether Rose’s claim is legitimate, and it is still Rose whom Karl seeks to deny. In the overall struggle, ranged against Walker are his wife and several other women, including his mother-in-law, who strikes the final blow.


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To perceive the male and female characters as antagonists and equals is more difficult than it ought to be, and the difficulty tells us something about the condition of women in that society: “From within the system, only differences are perceived; from without, the antagonists all seem alike. . . . Only the outside perspective, which takes into consideration reciprocity and unity and denies the difference, can discern the workings of the violent resolution, the cryptic process by which unanimity is reformed against and around the surrogate victim” (Violence and the Sacred 159). The detecting figure is clearly akin to the outside perspective; the sleuth observes and analyzes. But the outside perspective of an independent judicial system does not erase the differences between men/people and women/objects because they are concrete and enduring differences, made part of the system itself. This is only part of what the “real investigative power” (Double Business x) of Monfredo’s novel can show readers. It takes the public unmasking of Gordon Walker as his wife’s killer to rally support for Rose Walker—too late to do her any good, of course. While she is alive, her attempt to claim her inheritance under the terms of her new right has provoked unanimous antagonism toward her and her mission. Girard’s discussion of rites of passage sheds some light on her experiences: “the slightest change in the status of an isolated individual is treated as if it carried the potential to create a major crisis” (Violence and the Sacred 281). The context for this remark (and others cited below that correspond to what Monfredo shows of Rose Walker’s experiences) is rites of passage in primitive societies. The context tells us two things: one, as I have already suggested, nineteenth-century America was a primitive society for its disenfranchised members, and two, as women gained rights, they were like adolescents moving into full adulthood. An adult woman was not equivalent to an adult man in autonomy and freedom; the transition was not formalized as a rite, but clearly shares some of the features of those rites as described by Girard. With her knowledge of her paternity, and with the support of the new law, Rose Walker makes the courageous decision to gather up a few pieces of her old life and set off on a new one. From the moment she makes that decision, she faces nothing but skepticism and hostility. Many of those who are shocked by Gordon Walker’s criminal behavior would have supported his rights while his wife was alive. Karl Steicher denies that she is his halfsister; in fact, he denies that such a person exists, even though he has seen the record of such a birth in the family Bible. His subsequent justification of his conduct is weak, but his repentance after Walker’s exposure is real enough: he offers to give Mary Clarke “her” half of Rose’s portion of the inheritance (273). This offer is a belated recognition of not only his half-sister’s claim on the estate, but also of her right—as granted by the new

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Act—to distribute it autonomously. Meanwhile, Karl’s wife Nell, after a debilitating miscarriage, believes her loss to be God’s punishment for Karl’s behavior. Those who commit the wrongs, and those who suffer, are not the same people; in this instance, the crime and punishments mirror the judicial system in that the disenfranchised—Karl’s half-sister, wife, and daughter—are perceived to be “paying” on his behalf. One person from whom Rose Walker deserves considerable support is Edwin Vail, the man she intends to marry after she has divorced Walker. Even he advises her against relying upon the new law. In the letter he writes as she prepares to set out on her journey, he describes her plan as “complicated and taxing” and advises her to “please take great care, as you may very likely encounter resistance, as well as a fair amount of skepticism” (182, 182–83). His comments are hardly a ringing endorsement of her courage and good character. His letter to Glynis, explaining some of Rose Walker’s history, strikes similar notes: “I urged her not to go. I felt it might be dangerous for her. How appallingly correct I was proved to be. I also tried to explain to her that any property she might inherit would immediately become her husband’s. She felt passage of a recent New York law would prevent that from happening. And also, she wanted to see where her father had lived, and have the opportunity to meet her brother” (261). Vail seems to accept that it is dangerous for a woman to act upon a right that is legitimately hers, one of the few rights the legal system sees fit to bestow upon her. Girard observes that “the individual who is ‘in passage’ is regarded in the same light as a criminal or as the victim of an epidemic: his mere physical presence increases the risk of violence” (Violence and the Sacred 281). Certainly her mere physical presence had such an effect, and we see that her (male) friend Vail does regard her in an unfavorable light. Her behavior appears suspect to him. So unanimous is the trouble Rose Walker faces, that even Glynis inadvertently snubs her. When Rose Walker comes to the library, directed there by Constable Stuart to find Glynis (who is a likely informant about Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s whereabouts), she spots the Steicher family Bible that was sent there in error along with some books Friedrich had donated. The Bible is enormously significant to her: it is a piece of history for the family she only recently learned she belongs to, and it probably contains evidence of her claim to be Friedrich’s daughter. When she asks to see it, Glynis rebuffs her. After Rose Walker’s claim has become public knowledge, Glynis suddenly realizes what she has done: “ ‘It was her father’s Bible— and I wouldn’t let her touch it. Told her it was private. A family possession!’ ” (59). Glynis is a librarian, a keeper of knowledge, but she too is bound by social norms. Under pressure from the Rev. Justine, for example, she refuses to remove Jane Eyre from the library but she does agree to shelve it


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above eye level. In this instance, she perceives Rose Walker as an unauthorized “user” of the Bible and quite properly denies her access to it; only later, with more complete information, does she see the error she has made. Again there is a parallel with Girard’s understanding of rites of passage: “in some societies the individual in passage is stripped of his name, his history, and his family connections; he is reduced to an amorphous state of anonymity” (Violence and the Sacred 282). Glynis lacks the information she needs about Rose Walker because Rose has been stripped of her name (Steicher to Clarke to Walker), her history, and her family connections. How much this state of affairs is generally true of women’s lives cannot be taken up here, but it is a thought-provoking description. Facing such comprehensive lack of support, Rose Walker understandably seeks to speed up the process, to find a quick resolution. She offers Karl a quick way out: as he reports during the trial, “ ‘She told me she’d leave town if I gave her ten thousand dollars cash.’ ” His response to her desperate request? “ ‘I laughed—called her an imposter! Told her to get off my property’ ” (252). Once Walker files his legal claim, Karl decides to offer him the same amount “ ‘to get out of our lives’ ” (170), explaining to his lawyer that $10,000 was the amount Rose Walker had asked for: “ ‘That’s less than ten percent of the estate’, said Merrycoyf. ‘That would make you doubt her authenticity. Of course, how could she have known what the estate was worth?’ ” (170, emphasis in the original). The compromises she is forced to seek in her extremity are taken as further evidence of her fraudulence. Merrycoyf’s reasonable question—she could hardly have been aware of the estate’s value, and such awareness would make her seem fraudulent on different grounds—is a minor note, not perceived as a real challenge to Karl’s decision. “The rite of passage,” Girard notes, “is always an awesome experience, because it is impossible to predict at the outset what its course will be. Although the initiate knows what he is losing, he has no idea what he will be taking on. Violence will determine the final result of this monstrous mixture of differences” (Violence and the Sacred 282). This description dovetails beautifully with Monfredo’s depiction of Rose Walker’s “rite of passage” under the auspices of the Married Women’s Property Act, offering us another way to perceive women’s roles in this culture. The Courts The establishment of a judicial system is “the most efficient of all curative procedures” that have been “employed by man since the beginning of time to avoid being caught up in an interminable round of revenge” (Violence and the Sacred 21, 20). Girard’s analysis of the relationship between revenge and

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the judicial system provides an interesting way of looking at Monfredo’s exploration of Rose Walker’s “justice” in the court system. The significant leap forward, according to Girard, comes at the moment when the intervention of an independent legal authority becomes constraining. Only then are men freed from the terrible obligations of vengeance. . . . The system can—and as soon as it can it will—reorganize itself around the accused and the concept of guilt. In fact, retribution still holds sway, but forged into a principle of abstract justice that all men are obliged to uphold and respect. (Violence and the Sacred 21)

Interestingly, Dr. Quentin Ives’s comments on the state of justice in 1848 Seneca Falls imply that this ideal judicial mechanism has only a tenuous hold in that society: “ ‘I’ve seen it before. We’re not that far removed from frontier justice. Lynchings still happen where there’s no accepted authority with the force of law behind it’ ” (205). What Ives calls “frontier justice” applies in too many instances for the disenfranchised members of society. Most of Monfredo’s novels have trial scenes; clearly, the workings of official justice are important to her, for the inclusion of these scenes demands additional research. That courtroom scenes require extra research shows that while some aspects of justice may well be “abstract,” much is not: specific laws, and ways of interpreting and implementing them, change dramatically from one context to another. North Star Conspiracy provides an excellent example of this fact, as Jeremiah Merrycoyf, accompanied by Glynis, travels to Richmond, Virginia, to represent Niles Peartree. Although the law Niles has broken is a national law, not a state one, Merrycoyf learns immediately that the administration of justice has a strong local flavor. “A frantic foray into the Richmond shopping district” is necessitated when Merrycoyf learns that in Richmond, all lawyers are expected to wear tall silk hats (221). To him, this is “ ‘as pretentious as the sacred wigs of the British’ ” but it is a custom to which he must capitulate if he does not want to jeopardize his client’s chances in court. Throughout the trial portions of the novel, Monfredo presents relevant historical case law, and she depicts the attitudes of the presiding judge and many of the witnesses as having been formed by their local affiliations. When the question that is the crux of Merrycoyf’s defense is put to Victor St. Croix, he says that he is “ ‘not free to answer that question,’ ” alluding not to a legal code but to a social one (281). Those kinds of social barriers become law through the workings of the courts, as Monfredo makes clear through testimony and through examples cited as epigraphs. The epigraph to chapter 14, in which Glynis and Merrycoyf depart for Virginia, is from Jones v. Van Zandt, a Supreme Court ruling on the return of fugitive slaves;


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chapter 17’s epigraph is from the Supreme Court of Appeals of Kentucky reaffirming the power of so-called positive law. The laws and customs that are put to use during the trial flesh out the abstraction of the law (as described in the preceding section) and underscore the fundamentally local nature of justice. So, for example, readers get to see Amanda Kettles, who is called as a witness for the prosecution to prove Kiri’s birth status as a slave. Kettles is “a rather pale elderly woman with faded blue eyes,” but is revealed to have an African American grandmother: she is summarily dismissed as a witness “ ‘on the grounds that a Negro cannot testify against a white man. . . . The law of this state is unequivocal on this point, as ruled by the Court of Appeals of Virginia in Winn. v. Jones’ ” (270). On top of the revealing nature of these facts is the strategy behind the prosecutor’s move: he knew Kettles could not testify, but he assumed that Merrycoyf would not recognize her ineligibility to testify. One of Merrycoyf’s local co-counsel’s only contributions to the trial was his recognition of Kettles “as a sister of the Negro gardener he’d employed” (271); only local knowledge could provide an effective counter to the prosecutor’s tactics. As in the Kettles example, not only does Monfredo have a researched court precedent, but she also identifies it for the reader. As she writes in the Author’s Note that precedes the novel: “The issues raised in Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen have their bases in actual legal arguments of the period and, with one obvious fictional exception, refer to authentic Commonwealth of Virginia and/or United State Supreme Court decisions. Additional information may be found under Court Cases in the Historical Notes” (ix). The argument that Merrycoyf presents fictionally anticipates (by three years) the dissenting opinion of U.S. Supreme Court Justice McLean in the Dred Scott case of 1857. Her research is sound, and she carefully connects her legal proceedings to historical legal practice. This kind of public legal discourse has a particular relevance to questions of authority, as Lanser discusses in the context of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (1798). In Lanser’s view, Wollstonecraft’s attempt to bring Maria’s story into the realm of the court undermines Wollstonecraft’s feminist intention: “Maria’s address to the court . . . authorizes her voice in a new way, but for that very reason creates a collision with institutionalized authority from which the novel never recovers” (234). Maria, barred as a woman from speaking directly to the court, is forced to rely on a man to read out her words, and then the male judge has the last word. And not only does the judge find against Maria, but he also reiterates a general attack on women: “Immediately expressing his concern that ‘letting women plead their feelings’—he uses the phrase twice—will open ‘a floodgate for immorality’ [149], the judge denies Maria effective voice just as the law has denied her the right to appear in court: he undermines the public

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(philosophical and legal) nature of her speech by relegating it to the discourse of ‘feelings,’ the stereotypical quintessence of private female voice” (Lanser 235). Monfredo, writing a historical novel set fifty years later than Wollstonecraft’s, can address these problems of authority in several ways. Those moments when women are diminished or attacked are emphasized, made part of the story itself. The feminism of the novel comes through consistently and authoritatively, in contrast to the situation Lanser describes in Maria, where “the only public voice in the novel is the authorial narrator’s voice, and . . . this novel’s most radical statements are the statements not of the public, authorial narrator but of fictional characters speaking only to other characters” (235). Not just Monfredo but the other history–mystery writers are careful to provide radical statements on both levels. The presence of women in court must always be explained, and often it is possible only because a man thinks it will serve his interests. But within credible limits, Monfredo shows these women making an impact, in authorized and unauthorized ways. In Seneca Falls Inheritance, Friedrich Steicher did not leave a will, in spite of his extensive estate, and his wife died with him, in a canal boat accident. Readers’s first acquaintance with the novel’s legal characters is made when Karl Steicher files for letters of administration for the estate and affirms that he is his father’s only child. This matter is seen as strictly routine by the county surrogate and Seneca Falls’ main attorney, but it prepares the way for later court proceedings. In fact, the two men seal the transaction in a time-honored tradition of the men’s world: “ ‘while we’re waiting on my clerk, I’ll buy you a whiskey, Mr. Merrycoyf ’ ” (19). The trial shown in detail in Seneca Falls Inheritance is a civil trial, resulting from Gordon Walker’s claim on the Steicher estate. This would appear to be relatively minor—that is, not the high drama of a murder trial more commonly found in crime fiction, but an exercise in what we now would call probate court. The criminal trial that is ordered, charging Gordon Walker with his wife’s murder, never takes place: it is pre-empted by Mary Clarke’s personal vengeance. There is a constraining legal authority, but women cannot depend upon it to exact retribution; the legal authority is part of the system arrayed against them. Gordon Walker killed his wife and two other people, but the women in the novel have good reason to fear that he might not be properly punished. The value of this middle-class white male is considerably greater in the eyes of the law than that of the people he killed; furthermore, those people who would have supported Walker’s claims before he murdered his wife are still part of a culture in which a man has the right to do as he likes where his wife is concerned. The judge, the jury, the lawyers will all be male; it is not hard to see why the women think of taking their own revenge.


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In fact, several women conspire against Gordon Walker and other (male) figures in the book. Women are not exclusively victims, but can be seen to take on the role of prosecutor as well. Both Serenity Hathaway and Daisy Ross see the opportunities the judicial system affords for prosecution, perhaps because its potential for persecution has been so often directed against them. Indeed, its persecutory power would be especially evident to these two characters: to Hathaway as a woman who owns a tavern and brothel (the public repository of scorn, especially from those—like the Reverend Justine—who patronize her establishment); and to Ross as the working-class wife of a drunken, abusive husband whose abuses are enabled and supported by the law. In this particular case, however, by cooperating with the system, these two women can help aim its power for retribution in the direction they want it to go. Serenity Hathaway, the owner of Seneca Fall’s tavern/brothel, makes a significant contribution to the case against Gordon Walker. She shocks the town by appearing in person during the trial to offer key testimony. Jeremiah Merrycoyf, the attorney representing Karl’s interest in the estate, afterward wants to know how Glynis persuaded her to appear. Glynis, it seems, made a very practical appeal, by pointing out that her best chance to collect Walker’s debt was to keep him from returning to Boston. Hathaway is no stranger to vengeance, and she wants to intervene in Walker’s fate at the hands of the court. Her testimony at the trial provides evidence of Walker’s opportunity to commit all three murders; she alone can demonstrate that he was in Seneca Falls on the night of his wife’s murder (an important point, as Walker had contrived to make it appear he was in Boston at the time). She also supplies physical evidence in the form of Walker’s flamboyant suitjacket, left at the scene of the tavern murder and matching the scrap of cloth torn from his trousers by a local dog on the night of the first murder. Her final contribution to women’s retributive justice is behind the scenes: she exposes the Rev. Justine’s patronage of her establishment to Glynis, thereby giving Glynis the means to silence her only enemy on the library board, at whose appointment she serves. The persecution of local women by the Rev. Justine is thus ended by Hathaway’s denunciation of him; the reciprocity could hardly be clearer. Even Daisy Ross, hobbled by social customs that keep her trapped in an abusive home, makes an important contribution to the legal proceedings and Glynis’s investigation. After the violent scene with her husband I described above, Daisy finds a pale pink beaded handbag in their trash heap; the purse is Rose Walker’s, and it is another pointer toward the importance of women’s “trifles.” Daisy knows her husband could have not have come by the handbag legitimately and is afraid that he killed its owner. She consults Glynis at the library, and the contents of that beaded

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handbag lead to the undoing of two (male) criminals. First, among the feminine odds and ends (“[a] tortoiseshell comb, a lace-edged handkerchief, a powder puff, hairpins” [123]), there is an itemized list of jewelry Rose Walker had deposited in the hotel safe. Glynis notices that it does not match the list Simon Sheridan, the hotel manager, had shown Constable Stuart: several pieces are missing from Sheridan’s list and the safe deposit box at the hotel. Sheridan’s theft is thus exposed. The other piece of evidence is the letter from Edwin Vail; Glynis cannot make out the signature, but she writes to the return address on the envelope and eventually receives a letter that explains some of the missing pieces. Vail’s letter to Glynis is eventually read into evidence during the trial. Without Daisy Ross, the outcome would be less certain. In spite of her timidity, she puts Glynis in a position to take significant action against some of the dishonest and dangerous men who populate their world. The woman who acts most definitively against a system that does not consider women to be fully human, undoubtedly, is Mary Clarke, Rose Walker’s mother and Friedrich Steicher’s first wife. In the epilogue to the novel’s events, the murder trial of Gordon Walker is about to begin. He is brought to the courthouse, where a “priest” appears, offering “ ‘to give you a blessing, my son’ ” (282). The blessing is a gunshot to the chest from a “small muff pistol,” a very ladylike weapon. When the “priest” collapses, “he” turns out to be Mary Clarke, who dies, in tears, on the courthouse steps. Glynis recognizes her from the daguerreotype in Rose Walker’s possessions and comforts her at the end. Wearing the garb of one powerful branch of male authority, Mary Clarke preempts the actions of the court, another powerful branch of male authority. Because of the recently passed Women’s Property Act, the judicial system must be taken—in theory—as being on Rose Walker’s side. So why does she end up dead? A gap between theory and practice evidently makes her position not as strong as she expected. And what kind of justice does she get from the legal system after her murder? Her husband, having first gone beyond the remedy of the law because he knows that his wife does not plan for him to profit by her inheritance, then turns to the official power of the courts to extract her inheritance directly from his half-brother-in-law. Rose Walker’s mother, in her turn, goes beyond the remedy of the law to extract a personal vengeance. The cycle of retribution is broken only because Mary Clarke is old and frail, and dies after shooting Gordon Walker on the courthouse steps. The final word is not from the judicial system, whose “principle of abstract justice . . . all men are obliged to uphold and respect” (Violence and the Sacred 21, emphasis added), but from a distraught mother.

CHAPTER 4 (RE)PRESENTING SHERLOCK HOLMES

The veritist chooses for his subject not the impossible, not even the possible, but always the probable. Hamlin Garland, Forum If every discourse enters into a relation of verisimilitude with its own laws, the murder mystery takes verisimilitude for its very theme; verisimilitude is not only its law but also its object. An inverted object, so to speak—for the law of the murder mystery consists in establishing an antiverisimilitude. Todorov, The Poetics of Prose With Holmes and Watson, however, Conan Doyle achieved something closer to the ageless if not the transcendent. The two men can be ranked fictionally with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or Jeeves and Wooster, and (since many people subconsciously refer to them as if they were, in fact, real) with Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. Christopher Hitchens, “The Case of Arthur Conan Doyle” Now, the process has become complete: Watson’s stories, those feeble evocations of the compelling personality we both knew, have taken on a life of their own, and the living creature of Sherlock Holmes has become ethereal, dreamy. Fictional. Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice

hough the figure of Sherlock Holmes has been revisited by many crime writers, not until Carole Nelson Douglas’s Good Night, Mr Holmes in 1990 was there a feminist re-vision of the canonical detective. Douglas’s series features Irene Adler, known to Holmes as the woman because she outwitted him in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” At the end of Doyle’s story, Adler and her attorney, Godfrey Norton, elude Holmes by eloping to the continent. Douglas adds Penelope Huxleigh, impecunious parson’s daughter, to serve as Irene’s amanuensis and social/intellectual foil; in

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short, as Irene’s Watson. The three central figures enjoy high-spirited adventures across Europe, and both Holmes and Watson make periodic appearances. Laurie R. King’s approach is even more radical, as it requires Doyle’s characters—Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, Mycroft Holmes—to remain prominent in the series, but the central figure is King’s triumphant creation, Mary Russell. Russell is “an independent and outspoken heroine” who “blooms with intelligence and vivacity” (Stasio, “Crime” 41). Marilyn Stasio calls The Beekeeper’s Apprentice “enchanting”; Carolyn Heilbrun characterizes the Holmes/Russell series as “brilliant” (Threshold 94). King’s series succeeds on its own—that is, readers do not need to know, or like, the Conan Doyle stories, to enjoy King’s series—but it also provides a intelligent and enjoyable rewriting of the paradigmatic investigator and his loyal sidekick. Because Holmes and Watson have become such pop culture icons, King can assume that all readers have some preexisting ideas about them, even those who have never read a Conan Doyle story. Her audience will also include many readers with some knowledge of the original stories and those who have extensive, detailed knowledge of them.1 Her awareness of these audiences is evident in Mary Russell’s “Author’s Note” to the first book, when King writes (as Mary): To the reader who comes upon my story with no previous knowledge of the habits and personality of [Sherlock Holmes], there may be some references that pass by unseen. At the other end of the spectrum are the readers who have committed whole sections of the Conan Doyle corpus (a particularly appropriate word here) to memory. These readers may find places at which my account differs from the words of Holmes’ previous biographer, Dr. Watson, and will very probably take offence at my presentation of the man as being someone totally different from the “real” Holmes of Watson’s writings. (xx)

King shows herself to be aware of these multiple audiences, and in the two narrative frames that precede the text of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, she openly lays claim to a whole cluster of “reality” issues. Revisiting such a well-known body of work poses challenges to both King and Douglas, but these authors also seize the opportunity to provide feminist analysis of the Holmes mythology and to construct an alternative model. In Elaine Showalter’s terms, their work has affiliations both to feminist critique and to gynocritics. Their position is unique because they are, in a very real sense, engaging in literary analysis. The past that they revisit is not only a specific social and historical milieu, like the other writers in this study, but it is also a literary oeuvre, stories well known and frequently studied.

(RE)PRESENTING SHERLOCK HOLMES

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Readers find in these two series, then, the result of an analytical exercise—King’s and Douglas’s critique of the Holmes corpus—and the creation of a new model, one that takes into account the existing texts but reconceives and reshapes them in a feminist form. Their female investigators are excellent examples of what Lanser calls “narrative voices that seek to write themselves into Literature without leaving Literature the same” (8). Unlike the vast majority of Holmes-inspired stories, King’s and Douglas’s have the power to alter readers’ perceptions of the originals. Although none of the authors Lanser examines in Fictions of Authority address existing male texts as directly as do King and Douglas, her comments seem perfectly matched to their project: Such narrators often call into question the very authority they endorse or, conversely, endorse the authority they seem to be questioning. That is, as they strive to create fictions of authority, these narrators expose fictions of authority as the Western novel has constructed it—and in exposing the fictions, they may end up re-establishing the authority. Some of these texts work out such dilemmas on their thematic surfaces, constructing fictions of—that is, about—authority, as well. (8, emphasis in the original)

In this chapter, I consider the feminist critique of King and Douglas before turning to the new models they are creating for readers, considering their successes and limitations in remaking the Holmes stories for contemporary readers. Throughout the chapter, I incorporate the issues they draw into their orbits and discuss their narrative strategies for achieving all of these things. How do King and Douglas interrogate notions of reality? How do they reveal the inherent sexism of texts like the Holmes stories? How do they suggest, through their narratives, alternatives modes of being and relating? These are the questions addressed in this chapter. The Real and the Fictional Analysis of King’s and Douglas’s interrogation of reality, and the feminist orientation of that interrogation, should be prefaced by a brief consideration of verisimilitude in crime fiction. Tzvetan Todorov’s The Poetics of Prose pays considerable attention to crime fiction. Some of his essays deal explicitly with the genre, while others, such as “An Introduction to Verisimilitude,” use the genre to illustrate key concepts. Jonathan Culler’s foreword explains that Todorov’s conception of genre restores it “to a central place in literary theory. Generic conventions account for the meaning that is produced when a work violates or evades these conventions, and generic codes are postulated in order to explain the way we treat details in different

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sorts of works” (11).2 Helen Carr makes a similar observation in reference to a point made in discussion by Rosalind Coward: “if a clock strikes nine in a crime novel, we read that possible clue in the appropriate way. It will be different from our response to the stroke of a clock in a gothic novel . . . or in a modernist text, as for example in Mrs Dalloway” (7). Because King and Douglas have taken up a universally known figure, these considerations are especially pertinent, as each reference to Conan Doyle, Watson, or Holmes’s “reality” resonates with readers’ knowledge. Some of these references are light hearted, but others take seriously the issue of “reality” for readers. The cumulative effect challenges complacency, specifically complacency about women’s social roles and their potential to be active agents. I would like to consider Todorov’s argument about the role of “antiverisimilitude” in crime fiction, partially cited at the beginning of this chapter. Todorov explains that because “the obvious suspects turn out to be innocent, and the innocent are ‘suspect,’ the solution to the mystery must obey these two imperatives: possibility and the absence of verisimilitude” (85). Todorov seems to read verisimilitude as a sort of probability, which is indeed part of its definition.3 Rather than saying that crime fiction chooses anti-verisimilitude as its structural basis, however, I would argue that it exposes the many verisimilitudes that can exist simultaneously. Those who live under social structures that do not grant them full citizenship, in fact, do inhabit a different reality than those who are fully enfranchised. Reality for women, as shown by all of the writers examined in this study, is different, but equally “real” and existing simultaneously with the dominant “reality.” The solution to the crime does possess verisimilitude; at least it does in any contemporary mystery worth reading. The classical whodunit sometimes obeys Todorov’s law about the least likely suspect, but as the genre has developed (particularly in the area of character development) it does this less and less frequently. As crime writer Barbara Paul notes, “older mystery novels went in big for surprise endings, putting the burden of counteracting predictability exclusively on the conclusion. Revealing the murderer to be the Least Likely Suspect was a favourite device—a stratagem no mystery writer today would dare try for fear of being laughed out of the profession” (122). Todorov’s claim that it is “not difficult to discover the killer in a murder mystery: we need merely follow the verisimilitude of the text and not the truth of the world evoked” (86; emphasis in the original) seems much less applicable now than it might have been in 1966, and certainly has no place in consideration of the historical crime novels that comprise this study. And yet for the research-conscious writer, Todorov’s observation that “verisimilitude is the theme of the murder mystery; its law is the antagonism between truth and verisimilitude” (86) can also be seen to apply to their historical project. The world they are creating in their novels must


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have its own internal verisimilitude, but that must be based on the “truth” of historical research and presented in such a way that readers can have faith in the accuracy of what they are learning. Marilyn Stasio’s review of A Monstrous Regiment of Women identifies the milieu, the historical period, as influencing the verisimilitude of both King’s Holmes and Russell: “In the end, though, it isn’t romantic love as much as the novel’s post–World War I period that diminishes the brilliant ratiocinator, who pales into transparency outside his own Victorian era. But if her 60-year-old mentor looks peaked, 21-year-old Mary, who narrates this story, blooms with intelligence and vivacity in the less rigid social climate of 1920s England.” When asked about her reasons for choosing Holmes in a 1997 interview, King mentions the combination of Holmes’s character and the changing times, corroborating the accuracy of Stasio’s analysis. King asks “what other character in the history of crime fiction— of any fiction—could you find who would create the sparks with a young woman like that? What other turning point could you think of when the old and the new meet too dramatically, and the male and female face off?” (“Beekeepers” 150). She presents this idea in Mary Russell’s words in the “Author’s Note” to The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, too, when Russell comments on how readers will find Holmes different from his depiction in the Conan Doyle stories. “Her” Holmes, Russell points out, is an older, retired Holmes, but even more importantly, “the world was a different place from that of Victoria Regina. Automobiles and electricity were replacing hansom cabs and gaslights, the telephone was nosing its obtrusive self into the lives even of village people, and the horrors of war in the trenches were beginning to eat at the very fabric of the nation” (xx). Milieu, of course, is particularly important in historical fiction because it does more than establish the author’s credibility and provide an authentic backdrop for the events of the narrative; in historical fiction, the milieu is part of the narrative’s subject. Accurate, detailed presentation of the narrative’s milieu conveys information to the reader about that time and place; this information is an important part of what the serious novelist wants to teach her reader, not mere window dressing. This is especially true for the historical crime novelists under consideration here: although the plot is crucial for the success of a crime novel, it must obey the demands of the chosen historical setting and it should not render that setting insignificant. In a traditional cozy mystery, for example, we may take the isolated country house as writ, and observe key details only insofar as they might bear on the plot. (Could this character have gotten from the billiard room to the hall in under two minutes? Or could that character have found a weapon conveniently to hand in the library?) Rosalind Coward’s observation about the way readers note details, cited above, has an added resonance in these historical crime novels.

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One of the key strategies used by both King and Douglas to probe questions of reality is a variety of framing devices. Both series are heavily framed, relying upon traditional devices such as “found manuscripts” and calling readers’ attention to all kinds of verifying devices (both real and fictional). Each book in the Mary Russell series includes an “Editor’s Preface,” in which King writes in her own voice; these prefaces establish the found manuscript convention in intriguing detail.4 King, in the “Editor’s Preface” to the inaugural novel, describes the arrival of a trunk full of intriguing objects, including manuscripts. Readers know that the preface is part of an elaborate fiction, but nonetheless enjoy King’s construction of verisimilitude. She presents herself in the first person, as Laurie R. King, and describes the arrival of the trunk via UPS in circumstantial detail. Her captivating presentation of the familiar invokes a traditional awakening of curiosity. Instead of vegetable seeds, a mysterious package arrives: what can be in it? who can have sent it? These kinds of question form the basis of a great many mysteries. The preface goes on to itemize the tantalizing contents and to describe the manuscripts themselves in considerable detail: And, right at the bottom, a layer of what proved to be manuscripts, although only one was immediately recognizable as such, the others being either English-sized foolscap covered top to bottom with tiny, difficult writing or the same hand on an unwieldy pile of mismatched scrap paper. Each was bound with narrow purple ribbon and sealed with wax, stamped R. (xiii)

The elements of this description are familiar to readers of crime novels (and of eighteenth-century fiction, too). The details describing the manuscripts create verisimilitude and otherness, and the items listed give the experienced mystery reader reason to pay attention during the narrative, waiting for the appearance of some of these objects. In A Letter of Mary, King’s preface notes that “the inlaid box described in the following pages does exist, although when it reached me, there was no manuscript inside. It did hold a pair of black-lensed glasses, a dainty handkerchief embroidered with the letter M, and a key” (xii–xiii). The glasses are Miss Ruskin’s (12, 16); the handkerchief one of those Russell bought for her performance as Mary Small, secretary to Colonel Edwards (138); the key is to the safe deposit box where Russell deposited the papyrus (314). Not all references are this straightforward; the box that appears in A Letter of Mary, the third book, is first mentioned in the preface to The Beekeeper’s Apprentice as “a small wooden box, ornate with carving and inlay depicting palm trees and jungle animals” (xiii). Other items mentioned—“one carved ivory chopstick”—have not (yet) appeared in the first seven series titles.


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These prefaces do more than describe the circumstances of the found manuscripts and the accompanying objects. King also invokes contemporary investigative images and suggests the continued existence of Mary Russell, who functions as a rather mysterious collaborator to the project. The references to contemporary investigative techniques are often linked to evidence that Mary Russell is alive. In The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, there is a description of King’s efforts to “trace the shipper through UPS” that ends with the information that a young man paid cash to ship the trunk from New York (xiii). In Monstrous Regiment, she mentions receiving “an odd and much travelled postcard. . . . [Written] in handwriting similar to that of the manuscripts” (x). In A Letter of Mary, King describes tracking down the origins of a newspaper clipping she received in the mail after publication of Monstrous Regiment; this information leads to some fingerprint analysis that provides a match between prints on an object in the mysterious trunk and those left behind during the mysterious goings-on in London that are the subject of the clipping received. In The Moor, King writes that she has “received a handful of communications as ill assorted as the original contents of the trunk.” O Jerusalem takes this line even further, claiming that the original manuscript seemed incomplete, a problem rectified when “twenty-three neatly typed pages arrived in my mailbox” (1). Mary Russell’s commentaries address issues relevant to the stories themselves and only in the first book does her “Author’s Note” directly take up the reality of Holmes. (Her comments on this issue included in the narrative themselves are considered later in the chapter; here I am concerned only with King’s use of framing devices.) This change in Russell’s commentaries seems apt, as King’s notes set up a continuing (if one-sided) correspondence between her and someone who is presumably Russell. After taking up the subject of who is real in her note to the first book, Russell can leave it behind in the others, which resolve loose ends from the plot. In the prologue to O Jerusalem, Russell explains the chronological relation of this narrative to the others in the series and offers some comments on the difficulties of representing Arabic speech forms in English. When, in the first series book, King offers a preface from the contemporary authenticator and a note from the first-person “author,” she establishes two different kinds of work to be done by the framing devices. King’s voice, as “editor,” establishes a kind of external verisimilitude. These frames serve to authenticate the manuscripts she is supposedly editing for our reading pleasure; they also, as mentioned earlier, drop clues for attentive readers to watch for within the narrative itself. Russell’s voice, as “author,” works within that larger frame to comment on and explain the meaning of the narrative. In the books that have both editor’s and author’s frames, these work together to underline the themes of the books. These are not

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empty gestures, then, but pointers to what is important thematically within the narrative. For example, those comments on translating Arabic speech forms into English that precede O Jerusalem begin by noting the fact that “Arabic has more grammatical forms than English” but proceeds quickly to criticism of the usual approaches to English translations which are, she says, “stilted and thus inaccurate,” filled with exclamations such as “By the beard of the Prophet!” (8).5 Douglas’ s Adler/Huxleigh novels use a series of afterwords and editor’s notes to address similar issues. In these frames, Douglas calls upon another distinguished tradition, that of the scholarly commentator. Douglas creates Fiona Witherspoon, Ph.D, and gives her membership in the fictional group A.I.A/F.I.A., (Advocates/Friends of Irene Adler).6 In this voice, Douglas can take up issues of authenticity and certification as well as analyze the concept of reality. Douglas, in Witherspoon’s voice, cheerfully mocks both ends of the “reality” spectrum: True Holmes fanatics occupy two equally ridiculous camps: one holds that the tales as written by a historical Dr. Watson comprise authentic Victoriana and therefore cannot be challenged as to full candor or veracity; the other, even more extreme camp avers that a Scottish medical man of Irish antecedents, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, authored these pieces as pure fiction. This is patently ludicrous. (Good Night 403)

By treating Douglas’s own fictional text as real, the Witherspoon voice mimics historical procedures while dealing with two text sources, both known by the reader to be fictional. An additional level of fictiveness is constructed because while “the Huxleigh diaries” are Douglas’s own, she also claims her Holmesian pastiche as “fragments of previously unknown writings attributed to John H. Watson, M.D.” (404, 403). In the first four books, Douglas uses Witherspoon to comment on issues of historical credibility, linking “the Huxleigh diaries” to the “previously unknown fragments” of Watson’s (i.e., Douglas’s own narrative) plus the published Doyle stories “as recorded by Dr. Watson” and what might be called real history. In these frames, Douglas makes suggestions about the process of authorization; how do readers decide what is real and what is fictional? In weaving together all these disparate strands—some known to be historical, others fictional—Douglas’s Witherspoon argues for the reality of Holmes and Adler. In Irene at Large, for example, she explains directly, if humorously, why this is “true”: I have insisted from the first that Sherlock Holmes was no fictional construct, but a historic personage. Additionally, I argued that the Huxleigh diaries . . . support my theory: Holmes was real; Irene Adler was real.


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Indeed, to my mind the only suspect personage in the Holmes canon is Watson. This may have been a convenient pseudonym for the actual biographer, who has successfully hidden behind the “authorship” of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for a century. (ix–x)

Douglas is having fun, and she invites the reader to have fun along with her. Though both King and Douglas argue for the reality of Holmes, King does so seriously through the voice of Mary Russell, who is part of the story being told. Douglas plays with the ideas through the voice of a contemporary pseudo-scholarly commentator.7 Witherspoon’s insistence on the documentary status of her sources and the way she uses one source to corroborate another are good historical practice, yet her goals—and the conclusions she reaches—are pure fiction. The existence and contents of the (fictional) Huxleigh diaries corroborates the existence of the (fictional) Holmes; the joke goes even further when she pretends that Watson may not be real although Holmes and Adler are. In The Game, King can jest about fictional creations of other authors when Russell and Holmes set off to find Kim O’Hara; she is startled to learn that Kim is “real,” not just a character in Rudyard Kipling’s novel. During the events of The Game, readers will meet not just a middle-aged Kim, but his son. Russell accepts his reality, but the reader can enjoy the form of its initial affirmation: Kim is “ ‘as real as I am,’ said Sherlock Holmes” (8). The word “biographer” is relied on by both King and Douglas to create the impression of verisimilitude even though readers know these are fictional characters. If Holmes is real, the person who writes about him must be called a biographer; for Mary Russell, this is John Watson; for Fiona Witherspoon, it is some unidentified figure hiding behind both Watson and Conan Doyle! In fact, the fictional characters can be made to justify, correct, or comment on the errors of the one real person in this confusion of authors, Arthur Conan Doyle. Douglas points out that while Doyle has created an “operatic impossibility, a contralto prima donna” in Adler, she had “fun justifying Doyle’s error by finding operatic roles Irene could conceivably sing” (Castle Rouge 532). Classic problems of Holmes studies, like Watson’s shifting wound and his marriage(s), can be rationalized; in Irene at Large, for example, Douglas presents a narrative that accounts for the wounds and for Watson’s behavior in identifying them. Doyle’s bizarre interest in the supernatural embarrasses and infuriates King’s Watson and Holmes in A Monstrous Regiment of Women, and Russell speculates about the conjunction of the fairy fictions and the “true” Holmes stories. Watson tells Russell, “ ‘I have already complained strongly to the editors, but they say I have no recourse, since he’s only my agent’ ” (180–81). Russell has no idea what Watson is talking about, but King’s readers do. When Russell sees the article, only

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Watson’s genuine agitation makes her think the article is not a spoof of some kind. She regrets the appearance of the fairy article in the Strand because of its association with the “true” Holmes stories: publishing it “not only under the Doyle name, but in the very magazine that the Holmes stories appeared in, was thoughtless, to say the least” (206). Later, teasing Holmes about the fairies, she says Doyle has done him a service by driving away potential clients with silly problems because “ ‘now the British Public will assume that Sherlock Holmes is as much a fairy tale as those photographs’ ” (291). Conan Doyle’s spirit photos are not, of course, accepted as genuine, but no one doubts that his belief in them was; there is a playful irony in worrying about the nonfiction article destroying the credibility of the fictional tales. From her first outing, Douglas’s Witherspoon raises issues of suppression, of who is allowed to tell the stories and of what stories get told. This is the main feminist payoff of her querying the reality of Holmes. Because the Huxleigh diaries “prove” that Adler and Holmes were real, these new texts reveal that “some authentic Holmes material was suppressed” (Good Night 404, emphasis in the original). Victorian era discretion led to autobiographical material being destroyed, she notes, and provides the neutral example of the explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–90), whose widow burned his unpublished writings. This is her pivot for making the feminist case for strong women being written out of historical accounts: Similarly, witness the long loss to history of the Huxleigh account with its frank and surprising depiction of a liberated American woman in Victorian England. It differs significantly from the then-dominant male view, evident even in the Holmes stories, in which women swooned with “brain fever” at the first sign of crisis. As Watson observes in a rediscovered Holmes text, “Irene Adler did not swoon.” Exactly! And exactly why her unexpurgated adventures were suppressed—certainly through the modesty of her chronicler and later by other “judges” of their suitability for publication. (Good Night 404)

The modesty of the diarist, evident throughout her text, is corroborated by the provenance of the diaries, which were found in an abandoned safe deposit box in Shropshire, the home region of their author, the parson’s daughter, Penelope Huxleigh. Later in the series, as the emphasis of these frames shifts to Ripperology, Witherspoon becomes identified as the “editor” whose job is “to collate various and obscure nineteenth-century historical documents into a coherent whole” (Castle Rouge 19). The advantages of Witherspoon’s commentary for Douglas’s fictional project lead naturally to this increasing importance and visibility as part of the text. The two most recent Adler/Huxleigh novels come with an entirely different category of paratexts: the now-popular Reader’s Guide for book


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study groups, which includes background on the series and its author, discussion questions, a bibliography, and author interview. Also, Chapel Noir includes the first author acknowledgments, pointing toward experts and research resources. While the bibliographies are comprised primarily of biographies and general period histories, in the interview Douglas speaks openly of her feminist agenda. Douglas explains that her Adler and Huxleigh, like Doyle’s Holmes and Watson before them, represent two sides of one whole; their “split personality . . . embodies the evolving roles of women in the late nineteenth century. . . . Together they provide a seriocomic point-counterpoint on women’s restricted roles then and now” (Castle Rouge 533). Adler is “a wonderful vehicle for subtle but sharp feminist comment” (533). Douglas even situates her own feminist project in a larger landscape of such projects: “This is something women writers have been doing the past two decades: revisiting classic literary terrains and bringing the sketchy women characters into full-bodied prominence” (533). Douglas’s remarks raise the issue of how women writers approach the extension of those classic literary figures into a convincing feminist existence. King and Douglas construct their extensions of the Holmes myth very differently. King’s elegant solution is to create Mary Russell, the young woman to be Holmes’s equal partner, and set their partnership in motion after the end of Conan Doyle’s stories. Her choice of 1915 as the start of their relationship was a deliberate one; the date was chosen “in order to have him free of the whole canon” (“Beekeepers” 150). Holmes, King points out, is “a perfect example of a character bigger than his creator, and I have found it both a challenge and a pleasure to free him from Conan Doyle’s preconceptions” (“Beekeepers” 150). One of her foundational methods is that decision about time-setting: “after 1914, Holmes is mine” (“Beekeepers” 150). Douglas, on the other hand, has Holmes still professionally active, and constructs versions of his activities that fit cleverly into the gaps permitted by the Conan Doyle stories. Douglas takes up passing references from the original stories and constructs new adventures for Holmes, weaving a role for Irene Adler and Nell Huxleigh. In Good Morning, Irene, the main plot revolves around a long-standing criminal conspiracy, one that includes elements and characters both real—the drowned man pulled from Thames by Bram Stoker, Alice Heine, Sarah Bernhard—and fictional—notably, the Montpensier case alluded to by Watson at the end of The Hound of the Baskervilles.8 Not only does Douglas write the Montpensier case for Holmes (late in the novel she has him preparing to “send some cablegrams” finalizing the case), but she does so in a way that allows Irene Adler to have not just an active role, but a more productive investigation than Holmes himself. The narrative shifts between Nell’s record of her and Irene’s activities and the record of Holmes’s activities. Holmes himself can be found “usurping

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one of [Watson’s] rare privileges, that of recording” (174) his investigations. The alternating points of view consistently reveal Irene’s greater involvement in the case, and her superior knowledge and feeling for the people and events both she and Holmes are working on. At the conclusion of the case, Holmes is even excluded from the meeting for the traditional unmasking and explanation. Douglas’s great strength, in fact, is in building on details of the original stories in politically powerfully ways. She can take a minor element in a major Holmes story, such as Laura’s typewriting career in The Hound of the Baskervilles, and a less well-known tale that revolves around typing—“A Case of Identity”—and construct from such unlikely materials a statement of women’s independence and importance. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Watson hears of “this Mrs Laura Lyons, of equivocal reputation,” and learns from Dr. Mortimer that some local men “did something to enable her to earn an honest living. Stapleton did for one, and Sir Charles for another. I gave a trifle myself. It was to set her up in a typewriting business” (107). When he calls upon her, Watson finds her “sitting before a Remington typewriter” (110). While presumably she is in fact earning a living through typing, more important to the story is the fact that she also cherishes hopes of marrying Stapleton. Stapleton tricks her into sending the letter that lures Sir Charles to his death. In “A Case of Identity,” we meet another typewriting female who is deluded in her love life. Curiously, this story begins with Holmes and Watson discussing the difference between fiction and reality, with Holmes arguing that reality is much stranger than fiction dares to be, declaring that “ ‘there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace’ ” (252). This is the backdrop for the entrance of Miss Mary Sutherland, a large, short-sighted, flamboyantly dressed typist. She has an independent income, but she is pleased to add to it through her typewriting. She reports that she gets “ ‘twopence a sheet, and I can often do from fifteen to twenty sheets in a day’ ” (255). “A Case of Identity,” however, finally implies that typewriters are more interesting than the women who use them, and Holmes’s interest is reserved for the arcana of typewriters and the deficient moral character of the stepfather. He is content to leave Mary Sutherland, his client, uninformed of the essential fact that it is her stepfather, with whom she and her mother are still living, who has tricked her. While Watson queries “ ‘and Miss Sutherland?,’ ” the story ends with Holmes’s casual justification of this failure of his obligation to her: “If I tell her she will not believe me. You may remember the old Persian saying, ‘There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.’ There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world” (267).


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Nell Huxleigh is a typist, too, but Douglas presents the women’s history view of typing as a new career opportunity for women. Nell is no deluded victim, and she manages her typewriting career professionally. She pays tuition to learn at a “typing academy,” and she does not let readers minimize the difficulty of the task: “I did not relish doing daily battle with the black beast whose stiff keys required me to acquire the dexterity of a pianist while converting spidery copperplate texts into neat, printed letters. However, as my skills improved I came to take satisfaction in making the contrary machine perform to my demands” (Good Night 74). Douglas economically captures both the difficulty of the task, especially the era-specific heavy manual typewriter and copperplate originals, and the satisfaction of mastering it. Nell has textbooks to study, and once she starts working for clients she must learn “the law’s peculiar syntax,” in which she is helped by her knowledge of Latin, learned long ago at her father’s insistence (77, 126). Nell’s presence in the all-male Temple precincts is perhaps an anachronism, but Douglas gives Godfrey Norton and Nell several opportunities to remark on the strangeness of her presence there in mitigation. Some beliefs expressed in the original tales are taken up by both King and Douglas, and woven into their own texts in ways that highlight the gender assumptions upon which they rest. “A Scandal in Bohemia” is obviously a key text for any feminist rewritings of Holmes. Douglas, of course, has taken Irene Adler from that story, but that is not the limit of its role in these two series. The success of Holmes’s ruse for retrieving the incriminating photo from Irene Adler depends upon a thoroughly misogynistic assumption. “ ‘When a woman thinks that her house is on fire,’ ” Holmes explains knowingly to Watson, “ ‘her instinct is at once to rush to the thing which she values most. It is a perfectly overpowering impulse, and I have more than once taken advantage of it. . . . A married woman grabs at her baby, an unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box’ ” (“A Scandal in Bohemia” 226). What brainless, impulsive creatures women are! And what a world of dated assumptions lie behind the specific “objects” married and unmarried women value. Douglas’s Irene Adler is a married woman without a baby, and her depiction picks up on the tension between these beliefs of Holmes and the story’s resolution, which depends upon Adler’s word being “ ‘inviolate’ ” (229), like a man’s. In the tale’s prologue, Watson famously opines that love was foreign to Holmes’s nature: “All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen. . . . Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his” (“A Scandal in Bohemia” 209). Watson’s metaphor is irresistible; both

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Douglas and King revisit it in conversations involving Holmes. Douglas’s Holmes makes fun of Watson’s phrases, quoting from Conan Doyle’s story: “ ‘Love in my life would be “grit in a sensitive instrument,” ’ he mocked good-naturedly” (Good Night 4). Watson, however, is allowed to answer back, challenging Holmes on his equating “ ‘the company of women with diminution of your intellectual powers’ ” and drawing Holmes into a denunciation of women that is clearly socially constructed. Holmes defends himself by explaining how useless women are: “Think! How would an ordinary female accompany me through the night streets unhailed and unhampered? How would she navigate the suburban outlands we have trod together, upholstered in thirty yards of train and a veiled bonnet? Could she pick up a revolver and leave upon a midnight moment’s notice, as you often have? How would one reared to faint upon the slightest pretext remain conscious in the face of violent death?” (5).

This speech is a typical in its denunciation of women for the restrictions patriarchal society has placed upon them. If women wear clothing that hampers them, are taught they must recoil from anything unpleasant, and find the world a dangerous place (“unhailed and unhampered”), the blame lies not with them, but with the social norms that make these things true. Douglas, in raising the volume, has made this evident. King’s strategy is different, though she too puts words in Holmes’s mouth to critique Watson’s metaphor. While Douglas’s Holmes admires Irene Adler, he remains the emotional isolationist Conan Doyle created. King, on the other hand, presents a Holmes who has grown in wisdom. In A Letter of Mary, Holmes speaks to Russell about his “totally irrational” fear for her safety at Colonel Edwards’s house. What the older, wiser Holmes realizes is that sometimes “the heart sees something which the mind does not.” In explaining this realization to his wife, he echoes Conan Doyle’s words from “A Scandal in Bohemia”: “ ‘Many years ago, in my foolish youth, I thought I should never marry. I was quite convinced that strong emotion interfered with rational thought, like grit in a sensitive instrument’ ” (31–32). He does not deny the belief Watson expresses in the original, but he presents himself as having learned better in the intervening years.

Social Critique In addition to analyzing the structures of the Holmes and Watson model, King’s and Douglas’s series also look at the historical social structures of Victorian and Edwardian England. Both Monstrous Regiment and A Letter of Mary not only take a long, serious look at important topics like the civic


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status of women, but also go beyond that to consider issues including the history of women’s relation to organized religion from days when Christianity was new. These topics are not extraneous, but an integral part of the narratives, closely connected to both the crime plot itself and the verisimilitude of the milieu. On the first point, King has written that “using an abstract idea to underscore plot elements is a technique used in any type of novel, but it is of particular value in the mystery” (“God-Talk”). On the second point, she argues that if “detail is the life-blood of fiction, in crime fiction it is not only the blood but the pumping heart as well. If I write about nomadic Arabs in 1919 Palestine and describe the tents, the coffee ritual, and the kuffiyah, how can I fail to bring in the Qur’an? Or in 1923 London, give the reader the cloche hat, the silver tea-set, and the taxicabs, but omit the Book of Common Prayer?” (“God-Talk”). As the series develops, King’s “topics” change somewhat. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice charts Russell’s growing maturity as a human being and as a Holmes-trained detective, with the place of women in higher education a minor topic. The second and third novels put women’s issues squarely at the center of the action, not only the social/legal situation in the early 1920s but also their relation to religion from the very beginning; Monstrous Regiment teaches readers about first-century Beruria and A Letter of Mary looks at the role of Mary Magdalene in the early Christian church (long before Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code). The fourth novel, The Moor, is the most direct take on Conan Doyle: Russell and Holmes are called to Dartmoor to investigate a mystery revolving around spectral coaches and hounds; the references to “The Hound of the Baskervilles” are plentiful and direct. King’s interest in Sabine Baring-Gould creates another “topic” for the novel, one that is carefully researched and thoroughly presented. The review of The Moor in the newsletter of the Sabine BaringGould Appreciation Society notes approvingly “the use of Baring-Gould’s own books as a way to introduce key elements of the plot, as well as for chapter headings” and King “has done her homework” (Graebe). The centrality of this topic is evidenced by the inclusion of both a map of Dartmoor and a portrait of Baring-Gould, but especially by King’s postscript that provides contact information for the SBG Appreciation Society as well as suggestions for further reading. After taking on the famous “Hound of the Baskervilles” in The Moor, King shifts her focus a bit. O Jerusalem gives readers insight into the fraught history of that city, and of the conflicts between Jews and Arabs that are still a part of world news today. Her “Editor’s Preface” to that work does relatively little with questions of authenticity, though it does mention the arrival of the missing manuscript pages and explains the break in chronological sequence. Instead, most of the preface provides a historical overview of the conflict in Palestine,

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beginning with the situation in 1919 (the setting of the book) but ranging back in time to the Egyptians and forward to the present day. In Justice Hall, she turns to the issues that face England’s titled families in the postwar period and, compellingly, the story of those “shot at dawn” during the war. Again, her afterword points toward the centrality of this “topic,” bringing readers up to date on it and describing the “Shot at Dawn” memorial, unveiled in June 2001, in England. Women’s issues are almost totally submerged, and Russell takes a surprisingly conservative attitude toward the landed gentry. When she and Iris Sutherland locate Gabriel Hughenfort’s widow, the legal standing of the son they discover is of paramount importance because “an illegitimate child could not inherit, no more than a female child could” (278). Earlier in the novel, she wonders briefly whether Phillida minds being out of the inheritance cycle simply because she is female, but she—and the reader—have little sympathy for the shallow, brittle Phillida. When the five year old is introduced to the crowd as the seventh duke of Beauville, Russell seems to endorse this patriarchal system and its consequences as she rhapsodizes about young Gabe. Monstrous Regiment provides the most comprehensive treatment of women’s history from this period. Margery Childe, and her New Temple in God, are a brilliant means of putting women’s issues on the table naturally. The temple is not simply a place of worship, but a social services agency with a clear political agenda. The varied schedule of services are only one element of the temple. Their undertaking, Childe explains to Russell, is to “ ‘touch everything concerned with the lives of women’ ” (50). The temple’s key areas are “ ‘literacy, health, safety, and political reform,’ ” and the reader is made to see how these different areas intersect in their impact on women’s lives. Safety, for example, is both a health project and a political one, since abused wives have no legal recourse against their husbands. As Russell infiltrates the temple’s workings, she—and the reader—are offered anecdotal evidence of these interconnecting obstacles. Childe’s vision is transcendently feminist, because while she acknowledges that men do suffer social injustices, she argues that they have many sources of assistance available to them; women, in contrast, must help one another as women, crossing social and economic boundaries to see what they share. Partly for this reason, she speaks against the way the vote was given: not only is it insufficient, but it also shattered “ ‘the underlying unity of feminists’ ” (53). King can use the figure of Childe as a mouthpiece for strong statements about women’s place in society because she is meant to be a partisan public figure. Russell is allowed to criticize the lack of spontaneity in Childe’s statements on these issues, but her reservations do not obscure the vividness of images like this: “ ‘Granting individual slaves their manumission after a lifetime of service doesn’t alter the essential wrongness


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of the institution of slavery’ ” (53). The impact of the war on women’s lives is central to many of Childe’s interests: public service, women’s educational opportunities, and women’s religious freedom. Through discussions at the temple, and Russell’s participation in the temple’s outreach activities, King has a natural tool for giving readers specific information about women’s social and legal status in postwar England. She gains additional power through her use of chapter epigraphs which provide a long-view historical backdrop to the world of 1920s England. The very title of the book is an allusion to a long-ago patriarchal dismissal of women’s ability to rule: John Knox’s 1558 blast against Mary Tudor. The first dozen chapter epigraphs, for example, feature an impressive array of religious authorities and literary figures: St. Paul, John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, St. Augustine, and John Knox rub shoulders with Shakespeare, Jean Racine, and Tennyson. The chapter in which Russell first sees Margery Childe is prefaced with St. Paul’s famous admonition that women keep silent in church—of course, when Russell enters the room, Childe’s sermon is in full swing, and she has taken as her subject men’s fear of women speaking in church. Her point of view is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf ’s curiosity in A Room of One’s Own about the anger of the men toward women; Childe wonders why the educated, socially powerful, ordained preacher should be afraid of what her own diminutive self might say. The chapter in which she complains to Russell of “ ‘millenia of oppression’ ” is preceded by a misogynistic epigraph from Cyril of Alexandria, whose life dates are 376–444. The chapter in which Russell explains about Beruria, an early second-century woman with rabbinical training, has an epigraph from Knox on the extreme “imperfections of women.” Over and over, King uses these epigraphs as ironic counterpoints to chapter material; collectively, they illustrate centuries of patriarchal limits placed on women and indicate the size of the edifice Margery Childe, a spiritual and political woman, has taken on with her New Temple in God. Images of Women While the content is consistently feminist, especially in the contextualizing matters such as women’s legal rights, some of King’s plots tend to undermine the feminist intent, particularly in Monstrous Regiment and A Letter of Mary, and Mary Russell’s characterization suggests that she belongs to the category of what Carolyn Heilbrun has called “honorary men, neither admiring nor bonding with other women, offering no encouragement to those who might come after them, preserving the socially required ‘femininity,’ but sacrificing their womanhood” (Reinventing 29). Because Russell, like Monfredo’s

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Glynis Tryon and Linscott’s Nell Bray, is the reader’s representative in the text, and focalizes the narratives, her characterization is crucial to the success of King’s feminist project. Russell is announced as a feminist before readers begin the first story; the Editor’s Preface to Beekeeper’s Apprentice describes her, based upon her own manuscript, as “a smart-mouthed, half-American, fifteen-year-old feminist sidekick” (xi). Russell corroborates this assessment, describing herself openly as a feminist, but she obviously prefers to stand alone. Heilbrun said, in her 1984 MLA Presidential Address, that “the very heart of feminism . . . has to do with solidarity and identification with other women: how many of us are there, and do we greet one another as peers and comrades? For a woman to be a feminist, I would suggest, is to be where women are and to value the presence of women there. And to see to it, if one does not find oneself where women are, that women are soon where one is.” (204). If Heilbrun is right, Russell is no feminist. Part of the difficulty facing King is that Russell must be credible as an equal of Sherlock Holmes, a highly superior individual. An ordinary young woman could hardly be the partner of the extraordinary Holmes. Consequently, Russell, like Holmes, usually knows, sees, and understands more than the other characters, and when Holmes outthinks her, this is always attributed to her relative youth and inexperience. Russell also climbs walls, breaks codes, assumes other identities, survives physical attacks; in short, she engages successfully in the kinds of activities Holmes is known for. This contributes to the pleasure of reading their adventures, and marks Russell out as strong, intelligent, and capable. At times, however, her superiority can be a mixed blessing. Russell’s status as one of Heilbrun’s honorary men precludes any sense that she could be a model for other women. In the novels, she routinely fails to include, support, or value other women. When there are strong, resourceful female characters—Patricia Donleavy, Margery Childe, Dorothy Ruskin—these turn out to be either victims or criminals. More recently, Justice Hall provides the intriguing examples of Iris Sutherland and Philippa O’Meary. Both share many qualities of Russell’s, including a propensity for male dress and an ability to outperform men in typically male pursuits (flight instruction, shooting). They differ from her primarily in their unorthodox marriages and in the fact that they wear their hair short. This last feature, so much what one might expect from defiantly independent women of the 1920s, is explained in the case of Russell’s long hair. Mrs. Hudson thinks it “ ‘a vestige of femininity,’ ” but Russell rejects that explanation: “ ‘I think not. I find short hair too much fuss, always needing combing and cutting. Long hair is much easier, oddly enough’ ” (The Beekeeper’s Apprentice 193). In The Game, when she must cut it to pose


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as a military officer, the unwelcome change comes as a terrible shock to Holmes: “The moment my short-cropped, pomade-sleek, unquestionably masculine hair passed beneath his nose was the closest I’ve ever seen Holmes to fainting dead away” (277). Of the more substantive difference, that of their marriages, there is again an individuality that renders the relationships unable to serve as models. Gabriel Hughenfort’s wife goes by Gabriel’s alias, Hewetson. Her husband is dead, and she works in a business partnership with her disabled brother. Iris Sutherland has a lesbian partner, Danielle, but also a long-standing marriage of convenience to Maurice Hughenfort. She is Gabriel’s mother, but has pretended—for the duration of his short life—to be merely an aunt. Furthermore, among the minor characters there seems a virtual casting call of female stereotypes: Dorothy Ruskin’s insanely jealous sister, for example, and Russell’s cheating, controlling guardian aunt. Even on the more everyday level, it is discouraging to see damaging stereotypes perpetuated through Russell’s attitudes and actions. In Monstrous Regiment, for example, great emphasis is laid on the lack of physical beauty possessed by her friend Veronica Beaconsfield. “To her despair,” Russell tells the reader, “she was short, stout, and unlovely, and her invariably unflattering hairstyle should have nudged the wide nose and thick eyebrows into ugliness had it not been for the goodness and the gentle, self-deprecating humour that looked out from her brown eyes when she smiled” (24). When Ronnie describes her troubles with Miles, her drug-addicted veteran fiancé, Russell’s unkind observations serve not to refute, but to bear out, the chapter’s Shakespearean epigraph of “A woman moved is like a fountain troubled . . .”9 After Veronica’s storm of emotion, Russell tells the reader that “I felt a moment’s pity for the young man Miles, confronted by this red-eyed, dull-haired, earnest young woman with her Good Works and her small eyes set into an unfashionably round face of pasty skin, now blotched from her tears” (30). Like these elements of characterization, the plots can work to undermine the impact of the feminism in some important ways. Russell’s work at Oxford, first as a student and then as a researcher, is important to her, and is endorsed by the narratives. She does not give up her intellectual endeavors upon her marriage to Holmes, even though he considers theology a waste of her time and brainpower (A Letter of Mary 32). It is heartening to see a female character who retains a full life, part of it exclusively her own. In Monstrous Regiment, Russell is preparing a scholarly presentation, “the distillation of several months’ hard work and my first effort as a mature scholar: It was a solid piece of work, ringing true and clear on the page” (3). Her subject is women in the Talmud, and as Russell finishes her work on it, readers learn about Beruria and about the suppressed feminine imagery

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of God in Biblical language. The tutor who works with her on the research is “looking towards a joint publication. He has already scheduled a public presentation of our finds to date” (91). A group of visiting American scholars plans to attend their presentation, and Holmes underscores the point by saying “ ‘it sounds as though you’re being taken seriously’ ” (157). And yet, having built up the significance of both the topic and Russell’s presentation on it, King deprives Russell of her chance to present her work: she is abducted and held captive during the scheduled time. Even worse, this loss is never addressed by the narrative. Holmes, in answering Russell’s question about how he found her, tells her that he attended the scheduled presentation, along with Margery Childe and a host of academics, only to discover that Russell had not been seen in a week. The novel’s postscript, which gives information about the resolution of the criminal investigation, the respective fates of Margery Childe and Veronica Beaconsfield, and the marriage of Russell and Holmes, is silent on the subject. No regrets for the lost public talk, no comments on the future of Russell’s research are expressed. A similar dynamic seems to be at work in the next book, A Letter of Mary. The papyrus that Dorothy Ruskin brings Russell, a letter from Mary Magdalene making clear her role in the early Christian church, “rings true” to Russell on grounds both scholarly and subjective. The history concocted to account for both preservation and previous invisibility of the papyrus is plausible, and two likable, intelligent characters—Russell and Dorothy Ruskin—believe in it. Further, its inclusion in the novel allows King to develop some important feminist themes, including the dangerous brand of misogyny embraced by men like Colonel Edwards and the erasure of women’s roles from religious history. Russell thinks about how “this mere woman and her vision of the empty tomb was the foundation stone on which two thousand years of Christian faith was laid” (219). And yet the postscript asks readers to believe that Russell suppressed the papyrus because she did not want to make a fuss; adding insult to injury is the fact that she made this commitment to please the misogynist Colonel.10 As a writer of historical crime fiction, of course, King must either proceed with the fictional creation of Mary Magdalene’s letter or adhere to the historical record and discard it. But the loss of the papyrus to the criminals searching for Dorothy Ruskin’s will, or in some kind of accident, would not sabotage the feminist concerns raised earlier in the narrative. Consider Russell’s part in this conversation with Veronica Beaconsfield in Monstrous Regiment, which clearly suggests an unwillingness to wait for the appropriate moment: “A better translation might be, ‘If it happened, then it is possible.’ A good slogan for the feminist movement, don’t you think?”


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“Surely not, Mary. The possibility must come first.” I plucked the sheet from her hand and pushed it into the pocket of my trousers. “History is littered with odd happenings that were allowed to fade away into nothing, instead of being seized on as a new beginning.” (167)

And yet, given the “odd happening” of her possession of this letter, Mary declines to act. She prefers instead to follow Veronica’s model of deferring action to the possible, because “presupposed notions of the rôle of women in leadership during the first century need to be discarded” in order to make these facts acceptable (315). Russell’s actions suggest that she lacks the courage of her convictions; this is a depressing resolution to a vigorous novel. Both of these examples are based on the ways in which Russell’s actions and attitudes in the conclusion of these narratives undermine her oft-cited feminism. The basic crime plots themselves, the identification of the killers and their reasons for killing, often run counter to the feminist intent, and in ways that disappoint because they take away the reader’s pleasure in the feminist material established within the narrative itself. So, for example, King very cleverly plays on assumptions—Holmes’s assumption, but one shared by most readers—that an Oxford maths tutor would be male to surprise readers with the revelation of Moriarty’s daughter as the criminal. Any satisfaction in this demonstration of gender assumptions in action, however, is dampened by the vision of a thwarted woman tormenting her father’s nemesis, using one of her own (female) students to do so. Similarly, in A Letter of Mary, the vindictive, petty sister of Dorothy Ruskin turns out to be the criminal. It is ironic that a frustrated middle-aged woman is the guilty one in a novel that explores at length the dangers of misogyny to women. When Holmes remarks to Russell that “ ‘for a few days I allowed myself to hope that we had a prime specimen among cases, a murder with pure and unadulterated motive of the hatred of emancipated women. Now, that would have been one for the books: murder by misogyny’ ” (308), he identifies several difficulties for a feminist interpretation of the novel. The very real dangers to women of patriarchal society are trivialized, and the greed of an individual woman is responsible for the violence. The resolution of Monstrous Regiment, although the criminal is revealed to be male, does an even more thorough job of shortcircuiting the feminist themes raised throughout the developing action. Margery Childe, in both personal characteristics and actions, represents a challenging yet attractive feminist model. In A Letter of Mary, when Colonel Edwards speaks angrily of “ ‘frustrated, ugly old biddies like the Pankhursts, with nothing better to do than put ideas into the heads of decent women, making them think they

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should be unhappy with their lot’ ” (173–74), he voices a commonly held position: advocates for women’s equality are ugly, frustrated failures. Monstrous Regiment seems to counter that notion, through its presentation of the temple’s Inner Circle women, and especially in its portrayal of Margery Childe. The Inner Circle are attractive and stylish, on top of their intellectual, educational, and social advantages. They are “dramatic young women” (39), every one of them “obviously wealthy, intelligent, and wellbred” (42). Mary is initially put off by their assurance and elegance, but her remarks make clear that they are not the frustrated losers of popular imagination. After spending time working on some of the temple’s projects, she learns to see them not as “brittle aristocrats” but as “intelligent, hardworking women whose reserve hid shyness more often than it did condescension. It was a pleasure to work with quick minds” (226). Margery Childe herself is charismatic, intelligent, and highly successful; yet she is revealed to be the dupe of a crude, violent, and dangerous man who uses her—and her Temple—for his own criminal purposes. The short story plot, in contrast, succeeds brilliantly. “Mrs Hudson’s Case,” from 1997, is a deceptively simple tale that features both Holmes and his housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson, working separately on the same case. The two Oberdorfer children have disappeared; the authorities and their guardian uncle believe them to be kidnapped, but no ransom demand has been made and some believe they have been killed. When Holmes is called in to consult, Mrs. Hudson is in the midst of a minor domestic mystery; when Holmes refuses to help her, Mary Russell sets up a camera to get a photo of whoever has been stealing bits of food and domestic oddments from the kitchen. Mrs. Hudson, a kindly soul, wants to stop the thieving but would like to help the suffering person who has been driven to thievery. The narrative is structured so that the reader learns, with Russell, ten pages into the thirteen page story that Mrs. Hudson has discovered the Oberdorfer children and is hiding them. They were not kidnapped, but the older child (a girl) has engineered their escape from an uncle who is trying to kill them for the inheritance. Russell is sworn to secrecy, the children are sent to stay with Mrs. Hudson’s cousin in Wiltshire; once the sister is sixteen, a more credible age, they come forward. Holmes is kept in the dark about this, even after the final resolution. Mrs. Hudson keeps her secret to herself, but takes pleasure in it: “However, several times over the years, whenever Holmes was making some particularly irksome demand on her patience, I saw this most long-suffering of landladies take a deep breath, focus on something far away, and nod briefly, before going on her placid way with a tiny, satisfied smile on her face” (230). The plot justifies the trio of intelligent, capable females—Mary Russell, Mrs. Hudson, and Sarah Oberdorfer—at the expense of the meeker or


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misguided males. When the Oberdorfers eventually do come forward, the story points out, the younger brother (as the male) is seen as the important one: they are “the young heir and his older sister” (230), but the reader knows that it was the sister’s planning and resolution that got them to that point. The narrative emphasizes her practical competence in engineering their escape. At age twelve, she has gathered maps, as much cash as she could, and warm clothes, in contrast to her seven-year-old brother who regards it all as “a great lark” (228). Furthermore, once Russell has forced her way into the adventure, the issue of what to do with the children breaks down along gender lines: Holmes, they know, would insist on returning the children to their uncle with a warning to him, but they elect to secrete the children in the country. The women rely on Mrs. Hudson’s domestic informants and their sense of Sarah’s absolute reliability: “It all rested on Sarah. A different child I might have dismissed as being prone to imaginative stories, but those steady brown eyes of hers, daring me to disbelieve.” (229). In this short story, with its dual male/female investigations, the wisdom and strength of its female characters carry the day.

Partnership and Marriage One of the great strengths of these feminist reimaginings of the Holmes myth is the vision of partnership that arises. A quick sense of the developments can be seen by the cover copy of recent editions. The Moor’s cover describes the book as “a novel of suspense featuring Sherlock Holmes and his partner Mary Russell”; the next book reverses that to “featuring Mary Russell and her partner Sherlock Holmes.” Justice Hall simply says “featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes.” Of particular significance is the emphasis on partnership within marriage; Douglas suggests how Irene Adler and Godfrey Norton function as true partners and equals, while King does the same for Russell and Holmes. Carolyn Heilbrun notes that “if the detective novel, for example, required two males, Holmes and Watson, to represent a possibly viable marriage, contemporary detective fiction, like contemporary memoirs, either ignores marriage or transforms it” (Threshold 93). Both of these series transform it, as the key figures embody a transformed, equal partnership that is aided rather than hindered by marriage, and both Irene Adler and Mary Russell offer analytical comments on the institution of marriage and on their own negotiations with—and within— that institution. Russell’s marriage to Holmes offers special promise for this task because King is extending in a different direction one of the world’s best-known partnerships, that of Holmes and Watson. The differences between Russell’s

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and Watson’s relation to Holmes are emphasized and developed in ways that establish the value of an equal partnership in marriage. This is especially important coming as it does after King’s exploration of the traditional coming-of-age story in a specifically female context. The structure of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice draws attention to this metanarrative with its structure of four named “Books”: Apprenticeship, Internship, Partnership, Mastery. In the second series title, Monstrous Regiment, Mary legally comes of age, and the ramifications of that life event are explored at length. Like Rose Walker in Seneca Falls Inheritance, Russell becomes a target for male violence because she has gained control over her own finances. The possibility of marriage is discussed between Holmes and Russell early in Monstrous Regiment, when he accuses her of planning to propose marriage. After a novel’s worth of activities that lead Russell to examine both her own and society’s attitudes toward women and male/female relationships, they conclude their negotiations. King’s achievement is a rare one; she has found a way to balance many demands for plausibility in one marriage negotiation. Immediately after their Thames chase of the villain, the tenor of their relationship is changed by a passionate embrace. Russell agrees to marriage, but on the condition that Holmes “ ‘never again try to keep me from harm by hitting me on the skull, or by trickery’ ” (329). Holmes agrees to her condition, but with a caveat of his own, that she acknowledge his greater experience. She will do this, as long as there is no element of sexism involved in his instructions to her. Russell seeks an intellectual passion, and before accepting marriage with Holmes, she has rejected the “alternative[s]: freedom, academia, a régime of women” (266). She could not be “in love” with Holmes, nor does she desire “the doubts and frenzies of a grand passion” (266). What she ponders instead is the basis for a marriage relationship of equals, one that includes the sexual as only one of many facets; in her period of captivity she comes to recognize the value of “comfortable, interested, concerned, reciprocal love” (266). In A Letter of Mary, set two years later than the events of Monstrous Regiment, readers see the marriage in action. The pair continue to call each other Holmes and Russell, but this is not a sign of distance. Russell’s observations on marriage endorse its value, while the negotiations between these two spouses demonstrate their equality within the relationship. Early in the novel, Russell notes that “marriage attunes a person to nuances in behaviour, the small vital signs that signal a person’s well-being” (30). When she observes that “one of the most difficult things about marriage, I was finding, was the absolute honesty it demanded” (63), readers are given a glimpse into a properly functioning marriage, a partnership of intellectual


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equals. This is not the negative stereotype of marriage, where each spouse hides behind a mask or, worse still, deliberately deceives the other. Holmes and Russell represent a positive working marriage, one that honors the intimacy without perpetuating the inequality rightly disparaged by feminists. King confronts this issue head on toward the end of the novel, as Russell ponders a difficult decision. The case against Erica Rogers requires travel and action; Russell’s manuscript requires her full attention and access to the libraries of London and Oxford. This dilemma has two simple solutions— be a good wife, do what your husband wants or be a good feminist, do what benefits your intellectual career—but Russell’s thoughts reveal the complex situation her marriage produces. Here is the passage: I had known Holmes for a third of my life and had long since accustomed myself to the almost instantaneous workings of his mental processes, but even after two years of the intimacy of marriage, I was able to feel surprise at the unerring accuracy of his emotional judgement. Holmes the cold, the reasoner, Holmes the perfect thinking machine was, in fact, as burningly passionate as any religious fanatic. He had never been a man to accept the right action for the wrong reason, not from me, at any rate: He demanded absolute unity in thought and deed. Oh, damn the man, I grumbled. Why couldn’t he just be manipulated by pretty words the way other husbands were? (295–96)

In spite of Russell’s characteristic sense that she and Holmes are different— better—than others, the marriage she describes can succeed as a model. The traits and behaviors it demands are available to more ordinary men and women, and King’s emphasis is serious.11 My focus in this chapter has been mostly on King, as her series engages the Holmes mystique more comprehensively than does the rather lighthearted Douglas series. But both King and Douglas place Holmes in a different context, asking readers to see him not as an isolated genius linked to humanity only through his relationship with Watson, but in relation to people other than grateful clients or captured villains. Watson, as Russell notes, “always saw his friend Holmes from a position of inferiority, and his perspective was always shaped by this. . . . Holmes and I were a match from the beginning. He towered over me in experience, but never did his abilities at observation and analysis awe me as they did Watson” (The Beekeeper’s Apprentice xxi). Through the course of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, O Jerusalem, and Justice Hall, we see Holmes’s complex relationship with Ali and Mahmoud; in other instances, we see a personal connection between Holmes and clients such as Dorothy Ruskin. While they have fun with the

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Holmes “corpus,” King and Douglas also show us how the apparently simple art of pastiche, done rigorously, cannot be separated from gender roles, or patriarchal evaluations of “reality.” Both authors reveal the gender content of traditional structures in fiction (the Conan Doyle stories) and society (the civic, legal, and social status of women in this historical period), and show women’s agency within these contexts.

CHAPTER 5 SUFFRAGETTE DISRUPTIONS: HISTORY, CHRONOLOGY, CLOSURE

I’d been so pleased with what we’d done for Rose and it had come to this. A wild girl who’d been prepared to defy the world now wore a hat with a navy blue rose, suffered injustice without protest and talked about rules. Gillian Linscott, Dead Man’s Music

n her 1999 essay, “Hunting the Galosh: The Business of Research,” Gillian Linscott describes the process of research that supports her Nell Bray books. A former journalist, Linscott believes in thorough documentary research and consultation with experts, but also in seeing and doing for herself. In the early stages of researching Dance on Blood, she visited the Tadworth railway station on the eighty-third anniversary of the bombing of Lloyd George’s newly built house at Walton Heath; she made note of the light conditions and the environment. Much of the information she gathers does not make it into her books, but she argues that “as a writer, you need all that information you don’t use” (34). Linscott believes that this kind of research allows historical crime writers to meet three essential requirements: to avoid errors that would discredit them with readers, to include the telling detail that brings reality to everyday life of the past, and to “[get] the attitudes right” (34). That Linscott’s Nell Bray series achieves all of these goals will be evident throughout this chapter, but I would like to begin with one example that demonstrates all three. Nell Bray, Linscott’s investigator in the eleven-book series (as of 2006), is a suffragette, a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), best known in connection with its founders, the Pankhursts. This time period is a crucial one for women’s history, and Nell’s place in the midst of the action provides valuable opportunities for Linscott to provide feminist analysis and relevant historical information to energize her reader.

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Linscott’s careful attention to the right kind of detail is evident from the beginning, in Nell’s designation as a suffragette rather than a suffragist. British, U.S., and Irish women’s suffrage activists have been called both suffragettes and suffragists, and it is a common assumption that the former is simply a diminutive form, a way of mocking the “ladies.” The essayist Anne Fadiman, in her highly literate collection of essays on books, words, and reading, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, represents one example of this assumption. In “The His’er Problem,” her essay on the problems of creating gender-neutral usages that are euphonious, she writes that “the use of gender-neutral terms like flight attendant, firefighter, and police officer seems to me an unambiguous step forward, part of the same process that has euthanized such terminal patients as authoress and sculptress—good riddance!—and is even now working on the gaggingly adorable -ette words: usherettes are being promoted to ushers, suffragettes to suffragists” (73–74).1 Fadiman’s essays make clear how much she values care in word usage, and show her commitment to linguistic equality for women. She believes that men of a previous generation, including her father, the famous reviewer Clifton Fadiman, “were not misogynists, [but] they didn’t really see women, and their language reflected and reinforced that blind spot” (76). If someone like Anne Fadiman can be wrong about the relation between suffragette and suffragist, in other words, the misconception is both deep rooted and widespread. Linscott, as a matter of fact, knew exactly what she was doing when she called Nell a suffragette. Her novels distinguish between the two terms; Nell refers to a contingent of “visiting suffragists from Switzerland” (Stage Fright 183), for example, but she and her colleagues are always “suffragettes.” Trevor Lloyd’s book on international suffrage movements explains both the specific meaning behind the newer term and the erosion of that specific meaning. From the 1860s, there had been a variety of societies promoting women’s suffrage, many of them local groups; in 1897, many of these organizations banded together to form the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett (see also Holton 100). These were the suffragists. Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903; this was the high-profile, militant group of suffragettes of which Nell Bray is a member. According to Lloyd, they were called suffragettes to distinguish them from the earlier, more respectable activists: “The latter name stuck, and by now almost anyone who supported votes for women in the days before the First World War is liable to be called a suffragette. But at the time the suffragettes were a very special group—they did not always like the nickname, and sometimes called themselves ‘militants’—with a special approach to politics” (49). The OED supports the distinction, noting that suffragettes are

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“esp. one of violent or militant type,” citing a first example from the Daily Mail in 1906 (in contrast to the first citation for suffragist, 1822 in Blackwell’s Magazine).2 I have taken some time to explain this because I believe the point to be an important one. Historical crime novels can serve as sources of information about the past only if they get it right; they can only contribute to feminist politicization if they are convincingly accurate. This is why the details must be attended to. Readers who want to know what happened to the WSPU during World War I can learn from Linscott’s Hanging on the Wire. The novel opens with Nell Bray and a male pacifist literally up on a roof, and Nell reviews the state of hostility between those who support the Pankhursts, who dropped the campaign for women’s suffrage to give aid to the war effort, and those (including Nell) who continue to agitate for the vote and for an end to the war. Monica Minter, the persecutor of Dr. Stroud’s mental hospital for the shell-shocked, remembers that she and Nell “ ‘were on the same platform once’ ” (48). The conflict between these characters is simply one re-creation of the personal consequences of such an enormous split. Linscott’s representation of it is convincing in part because of all the other details she is careful to get right. In “Hunting the Galosh,” she describes her hands-on research for this novel: she hefted vintage hand grenades and an officer’s revolver, and she learned the procedures required to steal a car of this period (35). In another example, Absent Friends (1999), Linscott provides practical information about women’s political possibilities once they had won the vote, and notes how the division between pacifist and non-pacifist WSPU activists had consequences for that first election. As a would-be candidate, Nell lacks funding, political party machinery, and a constituency to run for. The lack of a party is especially vexing in light of the existence of “something calling itself the Women’s Party . . . that mainly consisted of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst yelling for revenge on the Germans” (2). It is her research and accuracy that lend credibility to the historical portion of her task.3 Her careful research also justifies her focus on the WSPU and a limited number of other organizations during the period. Linscott’s series is nearly silent, for example, on the more constitutionally focused NUWSS. A historical study like Sandra Stanley Holton’s reveals the large number of organizations that were constantly splintering and re-forming around both ideological and personal conflicts, and readers get a very limited sense of that from Linscott’s books. But Nell Bray is our guide to political activism, and Linscott has created a coherent set of alliances for her character. Internationalism was one of the disputed areas, for example, and Holton’s chapter on “Women’s Suffrage and the First World War” suggests that radicalism was aligned with internationalism (216–19). Many of the

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internationalists resigned from the executive committee of the NUWSS (219), and Holton notes that “internationalism was a common value among militant ‘irregulars’, and, in consequence, many, like Rose Lamartine Yates, now broke away to form groups like the Independent Suffragettes of the WSPU as a voice for such opinion” (211). Here we see not only the specificity of Linscott’s portrayal of Nell’s war-year alliances and activities, but also its coherence. Nell is an internationalist; in the opening chapter of Hanging on the Wire, she is in Birmingham “to speak at a Stop the War rally organised by the Midlands branch of the Women’s International League” (1). A section of this organization was formed in Britain in 1915 by some of those disaffected NUWSS members who resigned over internationalism (Holton 219). Later in the novel, when Nell gives Jenny Chesney the key to her house, she observes that her “house has sheltered suffragists and leading members of the No Conscription Fellowship wanted for questioning by the police” (189). At one point, the male secretary of this organization was imprisoned (Holton 218), and it too was an important group for those internationalists dissatisfied with the non-pacifist and patriotic elements of the suffrage organizations, like Catherine Marshall and Laurence Housman. These are, in fact, the kinds of organizations one would expect Nell Bray to ally herself with, and it would damage the credibility of the series to have her involved with too many of the other organizations. Socially Aware Crime Fiction Kathleen Gregory Klein’s influential study of women’s detective fiction, The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre, argues that if crime fiction is to achieve feminist goals, “the genre must be completely remade, stripped of some of its most characteristic elements and reinforced by a new ideology and awareness” (221). It is important to note Klein’s decision to “deliberately limit” the focus of her book to “the paid, professional woman who is the protagonist of the novel” (5). This decision places the emphasis on feminist reworkings of the hardboiled, and indeed there are some very influential writers working in that subgenre. However, of all the subgenres, the hardboiled is one of the least amenable to feminist revision, an inherent difficulty that may well skew Klein’s perception that the genre is incapable of being put to use successfully by feminist writers. One of the main foundations for her belief in the impossibility of feminist reform is the exaggerated degree of closure that she attributes to all crime novels. Linscott’s series of historical crime novels contradicts by example Klein’s argument that “if the traditional closure of detective fiction were abandoned for more open-ended uncertainty, then the status quo would not be reestablished as though all


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social problems had been solved” (228). I believe Linscott’s historical mysteries are a compelling example of the genre’s potential for feminist politics; she uses her historical setting to offer satisfactory mysteries with logical resolutions (closure) that simultaneously call into question the sociopolitical status quo and thus link up with Cora Kaplan’s idea of the political and create motivation for exerting agency. The exploration of social mysteries and murder mysteries—in tandem—contributes to the crime genre while discouraging a passive response from the reader. Which is the greater mystery: who killed mill owner Osbert Newbiggin? Or, why are women not entitled to vote? In Dead Man’s Music Nell Bray sheds light on both mysteries. The Nell Bray novels integrate mystery plots with analysis of (historically) contemporary issues, including some that are less evidently women’s issues but become connected to the main theme. Linscott’s primary strategy for achieving a more feministoriented crime fiction is her analysis of significant social developments and problems as an integral part of a properly constructed and resolved mystery. That these plots and social analysis also reveal feminism to be a part of history is no accident. Klein’s recommendations in the Afterword of her study imply an either/or relationship between identifying murderers and “a wider focus in which a variety of social issues can be explored” (228). Linscott uses her historical setting to do both simultaneously. Each book offers a traditional mystery puzzle neatly integrated with analysis of contemporary issues. In some instances, Linscott is trying to re-create the sense of novelty belonging to things we have long since become casual about: Freudian psychoanalysis, airplanes, female university students. In others, she is analyzing difficult issues that remain with us: the relation between pacifism and patriotism, the effects of war on the individuals who serve, and censorship. Famous figures appear—Lloyd George, the Pankhursts, George Bernard Shaw—and the women’s suffrage movement is, of course, a constant presence. The suffragettes provide a compelling of women’s agency in a specific historical context. Linscott does a credible job of re-creating structures of feeling now alien to us. In Stage Fright, Nell is called upon by a believably drawn Bernard Shaw to bodyguard Bella Flanagan. Flanagan has commissioned a one-act play, Cinderella Revisited, which is a satiric look at England’s divorce laws. Flanagan, a wealthy American, is unhappily married to Lord Penwardine and while his adultery gives her no legal leverage, her own affair with actor Charles Courts allows Penwardine to divorce her and profit financially into the bargain. Shaw’s problems with the censor are well known, and Linscott deftly integrates information about those struggles while turning them to good use in the plot: the person sent by the Lord Chamberlain’s office to observe rehearsals is a fake, a part taken on by someone who wants to be

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there and knows the purpose is a believable one. The play itself, and the troubled marital relations of the Penwardines, allow ample scope for analysis of both law and social conventions. Linscott’s reference to Shaw’s (real) play, Getting Married (1908), underscores the plausibility of her fictional Shaw play. All of this is what any reader might expect of a good historical novel, but Linscott includes a surprisingly effective reconstruction: she conveys some of the sense of wonder and dangers that came with the early airplanes. At the conclusion of the play, Bella/Cinderella takes off in a hot-air balloon; her costume for the scene is an “aeroplane outfit,” designed according to the latest speculation about “what the well-dressed woman should wear in the air” (28). The costume consists of an “aviation blue” leather tunic and a divided skirt tucked into boots, trimmed with grey chinchilla fur and topped by a blue turban. Nell’s reaction to the costume, and to the symbolic importance of both Cinderella and Bella Flanagan flying away, paves the way for her encounter with a real airplane later in the novel. When Nell first sees Charles Courts’s airplane in its barn, she does not immediately recognize it, but she “was aware of something in there, something like a brooding giant locust, a thousand times magnified” (143). Up close, it seems to have “wings out of a legend, easily forty feet across” and Courts asks with pride “ ‘Have you ever seen an aeroplane before?’ ” (144). Her flight with Courts depicts her sensations at experiencing such a novel event, and the reactions of all who see them, rushing out and staring.4 The exotic nature of what has become a routine fact of life is captured, and Linscott provides details about the mechanics of early planes that add authenticity. In the area of psychiatric care of soldiers during World War I, Linscott not only captures the novelty of something that is now seen as outdated— Freudian psychoanalysis—but she also does so where a literary novelist, Pat Barker, has been less successful in portraying this aspect of the historical context. Pat Barker’s research for her World War I trilogy was extensive, and her novels have done a great deal to generate interest in the subject and to convey information to general readers. And yet one criticism that can be made of Regeneration is that Barker fails to capture the contemporary attitude toward psychoanalysis, something that Linscott does more successfully in Hanging on the Wire. Ben Shephard’s comprehensive study of military psychiatry notes the newness of these approaches during the World War I period: The War Office had started a crash programme in psychological medicine at Maghull Hospital near Liverpool, the first “school of clinical psychopathology.” A landmark in medical history was being erected—thanks to the ironies and opportunities of war, not by some tiny sect in Bloomsbury but by the British Army.


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To a Jungian like Dr [Maurice] Nicoll, this was a moment of great symbolic importance. Some historians, too, have tended to assume that the obvious success of psychological methods of treating shell-shock forced the medical establishment to accept the truths of psychoanalysis. The novelist Pat Barker would have us believe that by 1918 officer-patients in shell-shock hospitals were discussing the finer points of Freudian doctrine with each other. (109)

Shephard’s point is two-fold; first, that in spite of the success of psychiatric treatment for shell-shock victims, the medical establishment did not subsequently embrace those methods, and second, that Barker portrays an acceptance and familiarity with Freudian psychology that quite simply did not exist. Dr. Rivers’s methods are contrasted to the barbaric treatments imposed by Dr. Lewis Yealland; he is clearly the central sympathetic figure in Regeneration, and he thinks of himself as part of the psychoanalytical process. Late in the novel, Barker provides a description of a dream Rivers has, followed by a detailed analysis of its “manifest content” and “quasi-sexual imagery” (236). He concludes that the dream suggests he and Yealland are pursuing the same goal: “Each of them fitted young men back into the role of warrior, a role they had—however unconsciously—rejected” (238). Like Rivers, Linscott’s doctor also psychoanalyzes his own dreams and actions, but he is no hero—he is a murderer. Nell’s resistance to Freudian treatment seems natural. Her friend, Jenny Chesney, in love with Dr. Stroud, believes in it almost like “a religious convert” (22). After her brief explanation of transference and the Oedipus complex, she offers Nell Totem and Taboo in English or German. Nell opts for German because “it’s a language that flatters inanities” (22). Later, she discovers the book is “a powerful soporific” (36). After Stroud’s failed attempt to kill Nell or Monica Minter and implicate the other in the murder, he commits suicide. His case notes on himself suggest that “being guilty of repression, a sin against the Freudian creed, seemed to worry him far more than the fact of murder” (209). Jenny Chesney still believes in Freudian psychology, even after Stroud is revealed as the killer. As she explains to Nell, she plans to drive an ambulance on the front in order to “ ‘objectivise some of [her] internal conflicts’ ” (213). Faced with that, and with Jenny’s fear that these events will precipitate “ ‘a terrible setback for Freudian psychoanalysis in Britain,’ ” Nell says, “I understood at that moment how Brigadier Moss must feel faced with me” (212, 213). The whole subject remains Greek to Nell, our representative of 1917 common sense in the text. The strangeness of Freudian analysis is dramatized most clearly through Monica Minter’s reading of Dr. Stroud’s case notes at the patriotic rally. Colonel Keyson, operating as a spy at the hospital, has stolen the notes and passed them to Minter. The extracts she reads are almost a parody of

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Freudian ideas: repression, unacknowledged sexual impulses toward one’s mother, raspberries as symbols of nipples, oral stages, Oedipal urges, and the like. When she announces that this is “ ‘how a doctor holding His Majesty’s Commission in the Royal Army Medical Corps treats a patient who tried to murder a comrade in arms in the trenches,’ ” there is “Uproar. Boos and hisses welled up from the crowd” (133). The craziness of the method seems self-evident, not just to Monica Minter and the crowd at the rally, but to Nell as well. The strangeness of psychoanalysis to this audience is clear. As Patricia Duncker points out, the best historical novelists demonstrate that “human nature may not alter, but human behavior does” (50). Linscott’s crime novels deftly capture some of these shifts. But Linscott is not simply interested in the past; her series also takes up issues that are of enduring interest. Hanging on the Wire and Absent Friends, for example, present absorbing and rich accounts of the relationship between pacifism and patriotism. In times of war, how do people discern their “duty to king and country?” What sacrifices ought one make oneself, and what sacrifices should one demand of others? The men in Hanging on the Wire have been sent to a psychiatric hospital. The novel is sympathetic to these soldiers who couldn’t take any more killing, but also exposes the way these institutions, intended to be supportive, can be exploited by those who feel very differently. The doctor at the hospital is a murderer, and one of the patients is a spy. These judgments incite further philosophical speculation, as the doctor is what might be called a personal murderer—killing for personal gain and ambition—rather than a soldier, and the spy in this case is spying on his fellow soldiers as opposed to the opposing army. But there is no doubt that the soldiers at this mental hospital are preyed upon by these two men, one of whom is supposed to be actively helping them while the other is pretending to be a fellow sufferer. The WSPU patriots waving their white feathers are painted as villainous, but in fact, some of Monica Minter’s accusations turn out to be mild compared to what was really going on at the hospital. How do we judge those cast in the role of coward? spy and informer? The novel, while posing and solving a satisfactory mystery, spends a great deal of time developing these difficult and complex themes. Similarly, one of the major themes in Absent Friends concerns the power given to individual landowners to either excuse workers from military service or consign them to it. Simon Whittern, the deserter, blames his former employer Charles Sollers for the death of his friend and his own troubles. As he expresses his view of the circumstances to Nell: “ ‘He could have saved us with one stroke of his fucking pen’ ” (266). Mrs. Sollers speaks for the other side, when she opines that her husband “ ‘was only doing his duty. He died because he did his duty, like all those other men’ ” (273). And yet she hopes that Whittern will not be captured, saying that


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such an outcome would represent only “ ‘one more person dead, that’s all’ ” (273). Whittern and his girlfriend stole a motorbike from the Sollers farm to aid their escape, but Mrs. Sollers decides not to tell the police about the theft. Complexity in forms of lawbreaking also features in Crown Witness. This point is made very clearly in the opening scene, when Nell finds prostitute Violet White in the contingent of prisoners taking part in the women’s march. Nell is surprised to see Violet there, because the concept behind the designation is to acknowledge those women who have served jail time for their suffrage activities. But Violet says “ ‘I’ve been in prison like the rest of them, haven’t I? I’ve got a right to be here’ ” (9). Nell can’t think of a more logical place for Violet to be and, although she knows the WSPU leadership would not approve, she leaves her to it. Both Nell and Violet are convicted criminals, a fact that creates a bond between them in spite of their obvious differences. After their jail break, orchestrated by Violet, Nell is reminded of other differences between them. Nell is shocked to realize that she doesn’t even have bus fare, which is not an uncommon condition for Violet to be in, and Violet’s response to their dilemma is to find “a pitch” while Nell’s is to seek out a well-placed friend (84–85). Their lives, and their strategies for coping with adversity, suggest a range of women’s experience. Furthermore, the cell of violent anarchists among whom they end up as Nell investigates represents a very different type of criminal; the subplots of treachery, betrayal, and official spying underscore the ethical differences between these groups (including the police, who have sent in Digby as a spy) and the suffragettes. History and Chronology Linscott has an impressive toolkit of narrative strategies for adapting the historical crime novel to meet feminist goals. First are two important strategies for resisting the kinds of complacent closure that Klein ascribes to crime fiction. History, paradoxically, makes closure less definite, less final. Rather than its “pastness” confirming the finality of events, it reminds readers that things continue to change. Linscott relies upon readers’ historical knowledge to raise significant questions about historical certitude and the finality of the past. If women’s right to vote has not been won by the denouement of (say) Dead Man’s Music, does that persuade her readers that the status quo will remain forever unchanged? It cannot do so; readers don’t need detailed historical knowledge to be aware that women did win the right to vote in England. It is noteworthy, too, that she sets Absent Friends after (some) women have been given the vote—surely most authors with a suffragette investigator would keep events firmly in the pre-vote world.

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Most significantly, Linscott emphasizes flexibility in time by setting her books in nonchronological order. The time period of each book is clearly established, with the year generally stated explicitly, but Nell Bray does not march straight through time, as is traditionally the case with series detectives. Her first appearance, in Sister Beneath the Sheet (1991) is set in 1909; Hanging on the Wire (#2, 1992) is set in 1917; Stage Fright (#3, 1993) is back to 1909. An inspired nonchronological pairing is Dead Man’s Music (#6, 1996) and Dance on Blood (#7, 1998). Both books are set in 1913, a truly noteworthy year for the WSPU. The events in book #6, however, take place after the events in book #7. Thus, in Dead Man’s Music, Nell can say “it had been a bad year, 1913; the worst” (2) and summarize events that have not yet happened in Dance on Blood. One of those events is the June death of Emily Wilding Davison at the Derby, where she threw herself in front of the horses. The horse that trampled her was, as chance alone could dictate, the king’s own, and the incident has been an enduring image of the suffragettes’ struggles. Since the mid-1990s, the Museum of London has presented the race footage on a video screen, constantly replaying the moments shortly before, during, and after Davison threw herself in front of the horses, and the digitalized images are part of several educational/historical web sites. In Dance on Blood, that event is still in the future, but Nell worries about a secret plan being hatched at the WSPU, partly because it involves someone named Emily: “I knew an Emily. We all did. She was brave, determined, and to my mind very near the edge where conviction becomes madness. She’d made no secret of her belief that we wouldn’t win the Vote until a woman died for it” (7). These remarks take on a different color because of the order of Linscott’s books: even readers who lack the knowledge required to associate “Emily” with Emily Wilding Davison and the king’s racehorse have been instructed by the preceding novel in the series. The utility of prior knowledge obtained from Linscott’s own books is also evident in the case of the firebombing of Lloyd George’s country house in February. In Dead Man’s Music, Mrs. Pankhurst is in prison, “convicted of being an accessory to the bombing of Lloyd George’s house” (2). The secret plan developing in Dance on Blood is precisely this event, and Nell goes to Walton Heath to try to head them off. But readers already know, of course, that she will not succeed. This event becomes the mechanism for the main plot of Dance on Blood, as Nell is sent on a mission by Lloyd George as part of deal she makes with him after Mrs. Pankhurst’s arrest. These two books provide considerable coverage of the events of 1913, brought to vivid life and enhanced by their inverted chronological order. It should be noted that until Dead Man Riding (2002), Nell’s nonchronological appearances are not reminiscences of old cases, or retrospectives, as are sometimes found in other crime series. Each case is


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presented in present time. She puts to good use the possibilities of the retrospective voice in Dead Man Riding, allowing Nell Bray to comment openly on things her younger self would not have noticed. For example, on the issue of women’s degrees at Oxford, Nell notes in the epilogue that “the three of us [women] did as well or better than Alan and a lot better than Nathan. . . . Alan and Nathan took their degrees. Women weren’t allowed to, of course, but at the time it worried us less than it should have done” (313). In all the earlier series novels, her narrative frames allude not to the past, but to the story’s having margins larger than Nell’s own involvement in them. Sister Beneath the Sheet begins by establishing the plot’s preexistence: “The story began for me in the middle of April, only nine days after I was let out of Holloway” (1). Dance on Blood has a prologue, which describes the suicide of a young man; Nell notes that “I knew nothing of this at the time, being deep in other things” (10). Similarly, in Widow’s Peak (1994), the opening is: “The first thing I knew about it was a chipping sound from somewhere higher up” (1). There is a world outside of the crime novel itself, and the stories narrated not only begin before the novel but presumably continue afterward as well. There is no complacent closure to be found here. Linscott uses readers’ historical knowledge to raise significant, politically aware questions about historical certitude. A Realistic Approach to Women’s Lives In addition to analysis of social issues, Linscott’s crime novels add range and depth to women’s social history. She writes into the record some of what the suffragettes might have done when they weren’t throwing bricks and chaining themselves to fences, in a spirit that would be incongruous in feminist biography or straight historical fiction. The retrospective view of Dead Man Riding even provides a turning point for Nell’s thinking, a revolution in thought that begins to account for her later participation in militant activism. Her upbringing was slightly eccentric, but she went to Oxford as a member of the group that Virginia Woolf calls educated men’s daughters. She is aware of the limits of “acceptable behavior” for mixed-sex groups, and does not want to be thrown out of her college because they have been violated. Her confrontation with Alan’s uncle shakes that foundation, however, and suggests how she might have become the brickthrowing radical readers meet in Sister Beneath the Sheet. Alan’s uncle has old-fashioned ideas about men and women, and finds Nell’s modern views amusing. On the subject of votes for women, he says, “ ‘Give? They’ll never just give it to you. If you want anything, you just have to go and take it. If you all wanted it enough, you’d have had it by now’ ” (63). The ground is ready, and Nell takes the idea to heart. She credits this encounter

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with the Old Man as having influenced her more than all the careful teaching and good advice of friends and mentors (63, 312). Strong and developing characterization means that Nell Bray and her colleagues put flesh on the fact that women have always had roles and abilities beyond either the pure passivity or half-crazed stridency often imputed to them. Linscott’s materialist feminist presentation of women in action militates against such perceptions. This truth about women’s complex attitudes and behavior is made evident from Nell’s first outing. David Chester, MP, barrister for the prosecution when Nell was convicted and sent to Holloway, figures prominently in the novel. His views on Nell are made clear. She is “a vengeful virago” and during the court proceedings, Nell recalls, he “managed to convert my half brick into an assault on the fabric of society. That was quite mild by his standards” (Sister Beneath the Sheet 42). Yet the novel demonstrates amply just how far Nell is from that one-dimensional portrait, and Linscott even spends time developing Chester’s family as characters. She is imagining beyond the facts (without distorting them) and analyzing repercussions and relationships. What is it like to be a member of David Chester’s immediate family? Linscott imagines an answer, as Nell imagines one in the novel. Mrs. Chester, confiding their plans for the evening to Nell (whom she believes to be a governess): “His brother’s a bishop. We’re going to play bridge in our suite after dinner. Mrs Prendergast was ladies’ bridge champion of Somerset last year.” She said it with timid gloom. I could imagine Mrs Prendergast’s cold eyes, poor Mrs Chester’s apologetic fumblings, her husband’s relentless post mortem. And, in the next room, the over-protected child coughing and fretful. All the pleasures of matrimony and motherhood. “That will be nice,” I said. (108)

The Chester daughters, meanwhile, are being taught that “ ‘[Daddy’s] a very important man and the King can’t do without him’ ” and that “ ‘Ladies can’t be in Parliament’ ” (77). At the end of the novel, however, Nell agrees to what amounts to a cover-up to protect that wife and those snobbish daughters. The narrative’s representation of these characters is neither one dimensional nor predictable. A noteworthy feature of Linscott’s continuing characterizations is that while Nell’s friends and colleagues are fully drawn characters whose circumstances change realistically, only Nell appears in every book. The central characters—those not involved in the circumstances of the crime—are an ensemble, but they come and go. This mirrors real life, of course, where relationships ebb and flow, but it also represents another way in which Linscott loosens conventions, this one concerning sidekicks or ensemble casts. In other words, Nell does not work alone, as in one tradition of crime


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fiction, nor does she have a regular Watson of her own. When characters such as Bobbie Fieldfare, Simon Frater, David Ellward, Bill Musgrave, or Rose Mills are absent from a book, their absence is not commented on or explained. One feature of the nonchronological ordering of the books is that readers who follow the series as titles are published know that certain apparent possibilities are in fact impossibilities. Dead Man’s Music, in which Nell meets Bill Musgrave, would appear to be a traditional crime fiction romance; since readers have already seen Nell in 1917, however, in Hanging on the Wire, they know the romance does not have a conventional conclusion (i.e., marriage). Like Monfredo’s Glynis Tryon, Nell is unmarried by conscious decision. When Bill Musgrave proposes the “honourable estate” of marriage at the conclusion of Absent Friends, she recommends instead the pleasures of a “dishonourable estate. In the right company” (282). Nell is a mature woman, not an ingénue. She will turn forty-two in 1919 but feels little anxiety about that “advanced” age (for a woman, according to conventional wisdom); she is tall, imposing, and outspoken. These elements of her characterization make Nell an outstanding protagonist for a feminist history/mystery series. She is a realistically situated and effective agent. All of the major characters change and develop realistically over time, and their presence and absence in various books reflect a realistic approach to women’s lives. Nell’s relationships with men are adroitly handled, and contribute to readers’ understanding of Nell and to a larger picture of the choices available to women during this time period. Besides her brother, Stuart, who appears in Dead Man’s Music, Nell has important relationships with three men: Bill Musgrave, Simon Frater, and David Ellward. Simon Frater is a friend and a supporter of women’s suffrage who features briefly but significantly in Dead Man’s Music and Crown Witness as a concerned friend. David Ellward and Nell share a romantic past, one never fully elaborated. In Hanging on the Wire, Nell is surprised to find that he is a patient at the psychiatric hospital. Their shared past includes a marriage proposal, one that Nell turned down for reasons of her own: “ ‘There was so much else that needed doing’ ” (30). David appears again in Absent Friends, and there is, inevitably, tension between David and Bill Musgrave. Bill knows, because Nell told him, that before the war she and Ellward had been lovers. The argument between Bill and Nell over Ellward rings true to both of their characters and to the circumstances of their relationship, which includes both friendship, love, and Bill’s official role as her campaign agent. Bill wants Ellward to go, and his stated reasons reflect all of these aspects: “Nell, may I just remind you of some of our problems? The Conservative candidate thinks you’re in a plot to slander him. The Liberal thinks you had

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him coshed and pickled in cider. Half the town has doubts about your patriotism and probably more than half is convinced that you and I are living openly together as lovers. . . . Wouldn’t you say that in the circumstances the last thing you need is the appearance of another . . . man from your past?” (144; second ellipses in original)

Nell keeps to her principles and her pragmatic focus on creating change: they should not turn away an enthusiastic volunteer when they are not overwhelmed with supporters, regardless of hurt feelings and jealousy. Nell’s relationship with Bill Musgrave is, as noted earlier, limited by readers’ knowledge of later events even before he is introduced as a character. He plays an important role in three novels: Dead Man’s Music, Absent Friends, and The Perfect Daughter. Although two Nell Bray titles were published between Dead Man’s Music and The Perfect Daughter, their time settings are contiguous: Nell meets him in later 1913 in the first book, and their relationship develops the following year in The Perfect Daughter. While the book makes clear that they are—or have been—lovers, this is presented indirectly. Watching Nell work out her relationship with a man that she clearly cares for in the context of her deliberately held independence also contributes to Linscott’s portrayal of women’s social opportunities and restrictions. In The Perfect Daughter, Nell is outraged by Bill’s letter: “I was furious. Let your defences down for an hour or two, and a man assumes that you’re simply waiting for him to gallop into view on a white charger—or in this case a bicycle—and start running your life for you. I’d thought that Bill was different and I’d been wrong” (154). Later in the novel, of course, she realizes that while she had been angry about his interference, perhaps he was right: about the case under investigation, of course, not about his right to take care of her. This dynamic is reminiscent of that between Holmes and Russell in King’s series. It is through her insight and action that his life is saved at the end of the book, but the relationship is essentially in abeyance after the events of the book. In Absent Friends, set in 1918, Bill has returned from the European theater of war and realizes that what would best serve Nell’s interests is providing practical assistance with her political campaign. Each of Nell’s cases is resolved while the social and political possibilities are kept open; Rose Mills’s character provides an excellent example. She is first introduced as the sister of Tansy Mills, the personal maid of Topaz Brown, who has willed her estate to the WSPU (as a lark, as it turns out) in Sister Beneath the Sheet. Rose’s importance as a character is not immediately obvious; in that first novel, she appears as a confused and unhappy girl, under the influence of the volatile Bobbie Fieldfare. She is introduced as “a ten-bob-a-week seamstress in a sweat shop off the Mile End Road” (9), and


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her suffrage activities cause a great deal of anger and unhappiness for her sister. She has a great many problems in Sister Beneath the Sheet, but she is always determined and refuses to do anything she does not believe in. Rose’s future is of interest at the novel’s end. Nell is thinking of trying to get her in at a teacher’s training college that “would not be shocked by a police record acquired in a good cause” (224), and Rose continues to be active in the suffrage cause independent of Bobbie Fieldfare. In the book’s final scene, in fact, it is Bobbie who asks Nell for news of Rose: Bobbie asks after her by enquiring whether Nell has “ ‘seen Rose Mills lately?’ ” (224). This kind of intermediate progress is typical of Linscott’s development of character and situation. From being under the dubious patronage of Bobbie Fieldfare, Rose moves to the practical and forward-thinking patronage of Nell Bray but is still not fully independent: her life is still being organized by these stronger women characters. Progress is made, but the world is not remade in one book. By the time of Dead Man’s Music, set four years later than Sister Beneath the Sheet, Rose has completed her teacher’s training, gotten her first job (in Wimbledon), and lost that job because she began a relationship with a fellow (male) teacher. The male teacher, of course, did not lose his job. Nell is enraged by this turn of events, and depressed by Rose’s passive response to it; this scene is the source of my chapter epigraph. When Rose arrives on her doorstep, Nell is preparing to visit her brother in the north, literally packing her bags; he has invited her because he is concerned about her health, and says that she may bring a friend. Nell figures she might as well invite Rose, who is at loose ends, and Rose agrees to go primarily because she does not know what else to do. The consequences of such indifferent motivations and casual decisions are immense. Rose is the one who gets Nell fully involved in investigating the murder of Osbert Newbiggin, and she provides crucial help during the investigation. More importantly, she finds a new teaching job at a school in Manchester. Nell comments to her sister-in-law that she feels guilty about Rose; she explains that “ ‘I’ve helped to take her out of one world, but there isn’t another ready for her yet’ ” (77). The paternalism of Nell’s guilt is made superfluous by Rose’s new-found independence. Rose has gotten her own job, and made her own housing arrangements; she breaks the news to Nell as they end their visit. So the “wild girl” Rose of Sister Beneath the Sheet “talks about rules” in Dead Man’s Music; readers are encourage to wonder what she will do next. In Absent Friends, set five years after the events of Dead Man’s Music, Rose is married to union activist Jimmy Kendal and is helping him in his campaign to be elected to Parliament. Jimmy has “an excellent chance of being elected,” and Rose is “full of excitement” (12) when she invites Nell to join the campaign team. Later in the novel, Nell receives another letter saying

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the campaign had been successful (184). In Linscott’s series, there is neither happily-ever-after nor eternal pessimism; hers are characters living in the midst of change, and striving to create more. * * * “Elections are about the future” Nell explains at the end of Absent Friends (255). Elections are a tool for changing the future, which is why the next step for women, after gaining their right to vote, is to run for office. Nell’s fictional attempt fails, as did most of the real women’s campaigns of 1918.5 So Absent Friends is a story of failure; but it is also a story of success. The opportunity to be a candidate and actually vote for herself, is a victory for Nell. At the end of the novel, Bill Musgrave suggests to Nell that she go into business for herself as a professional investigator. To that point, the multilingual Nell had earned her living by translating and some journalism; her investigations were largely fortuitous. Nell moving into the professional— but not “hardboiled”—sphere offers potential for an even stronger reform of the mystery genre along feminist lines. Linscott readers should stay tuned for further developments; although she has published three more Nell Bray novels since Absent Friends, all are set in earlier years (1914, 1900, and 1906, respectively). So how did Linscott evolve into a writer of powerful feminist historical crime novels? Her first novel was A Healthy Body, the first of three lighthearted contemporary crime novels featuring the middle-aged, inept Birdie Linnet. Linnet is often the last to realize what is going on, overlooking circumstances obvious to everyone around him. After the third Linnet book, A Whiff of Sulfur, Linscott published a pair of nonseries historical mysteries, Unknown Hand and Murder, I Presume. These two books appear, in retrospect, as clear stages on the way to the Nell Bray series. Not only do historical settings come into play and then become more significant, but the feminist authorial voice also emerges. Unknown Hand has a contemporary frame, featuring a junior research fellow at Oxford and the mysterious, beautiful young woman who joins him on his quest. The historical setting is the Left Bank of the 1950s, inhabited by a group of British bohemians. Colin and Kay work to identify the author of the erotic novel Colin discovers when it is mistakenly delivered to him at the Bodleian. Along the way, the pair encounters kidnappers, killers, academics, and politicians. Colin’s male perspective is never subverted, and the author/killer is the hysterical middle-aged wife of a career politician. The shift between Unknown Hand and Murder, I Presume is striking. The contemporary frame is gone, and the historical setting is the milieu of Victorian era African “explorers” and the companies and societies that


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sponsored them; the wake of David Livingstone opens the novel. While the investigator is male, the narrative slyly reveals his blind spots, particularly where women are concerned. Peter Pentland, minus one leg and unable to return to African exploration, is asked to “look after” the wives of two rival explorers. These women are complete opposites in personal style—one traditionally feminine, the other tough and practical—and they are rivals by default. Pentland, thinking he is taking care of them, shows himself to be unaware of their true motivations and capabilities, but at novel’s end he is enlightened. Although disliking each other personally, the two women worked together in secret to eliminate a common enemy. (Ironically, Pentland himself was inadvertently responsible for administering the dose of poison the women had obtained.) In the final chapter, Pentland’s vision of Cecelia Bright as a fragile, childlike figure is exploded, and he must acknowledge to himself how successfully Maud Stretton has managed her independence. The widowed Cecelia is marrying a rich, elderly, titled gentleman, and Maud is rejoining her husband in Africa. Although the investigator is male, the two women who are ostensibly under his care turn out to be far more interesting and intelligent than he is, and Linscott’s use of the historical setting provides an opportunity for social commentary. Pentland’s sense of isolation in England allows him to see clearly the oddities of his “tribe,” and his own blindness where women’s roles are concerned adds another level of social critique. In fact, it is so provocative that the only thing for it is to create Nell Bray: her triumphant arrival seems inevitable after Murder, I Presume.


CHAPTER 6 WOMEN AND THE EVER-PRESENT PAST

We make up history as story, and until we do, it does not exist. But the past existed, and we are the proof of its passage. The past is written into us. Patricia Duncker, Writing on the Wall I am not sure why it troubles me so, if not for ancient scandals. Someday, I know, one of his misbegotten will face us with it. Someone who will discover the books. Gemma O’Connor, Farewell to the Flesh

emma O’Connor and Sharyn McCrumb perform the same kinds of historical research and reimagining as do the other writers included in this book, but they also address the direct connections between that past and our present through contemporary frames. Both of these writers use multiple time settings, examine the interconnections between public and private (family) history, and consider the role of history in shaping present events and molding individual identity. A major achievement of their work, one that arises from this focus on the relations between past and present, is the revelation of how much is hidden or excluded from official historical records. To understand the past, whether it is thirty years ago or three hundred, we must attend to other sources of knowledge. Their narrative strategies suggest what some of these sources of knowledge might be. McCrumb’s own research, for example, parallels the kind of “research” her characters undertake in her novels while O’Connor’s female investigators must search through old documents, letters, even book catalogs to find answers to their questions. Both series forge explicit links between past and present through multiple time settings, highlighting family inheritances that run parallel to known historical events (the bombing of North Dublin during World War II in O’Connor’s Falls the Shadow or the “collecting” of folk ballads in the Appalachian mountains in McCrumb’s

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The Songcatcher). Both writers use important chapter epigraphs to develop their analysis; in keeping with the philosophy of their projects, both authors not only draw on “real” sources for these epigraphs but construct some of their own that then achieve quasi-documentary status. Gemma O’Connor is Irish by birth and background, but has lived for a considerable time in Oxford. In her novels, she draws upon her own experience of growing up in Ireland, negotiating Irishness in both France and England, and her specialized knowledge of the book trade and book binding. She has published six crime novels; the first two were originally published in Dublin by Poolbeg Press (where Kate Cruise O’Brien was her editor) before being republished as Bantam titles. Her subsequent books were paperback originals with Bantam. Her first four books have never been in print in the United States, but the fifth and sixth were published in the U.S. market in 2003 and 2004, respectively. She is now working on a trilogy, based on an Irish family, that will span the twentieth century. The second and fourth of her crime novels make the most extensive use of historical settings, but each of the novels adds to O’Connor’s developing examination of the hazards hidden beneath apparently clear-cut temporal and geographical realms. Her first novel, Sins of Omission (1995), reveals how secrets from the past can explode into the present. People die because the past revisits them in unbearable ways. The main character, Grace Hartfield, is forced by the deaths of her sister Eileen and Eileen’s daughter Bridget upon a self-exploration for which she is not prepared; indeed, she believed her sister to have been dead for thirty years. O’Connor’s next novel, Falls the Shadow (1996), revolves around the contemporary daughter’s attempt (in 1992) to come to terms with her murdered mother’s World War II–years Dublin diary, in which the individual story is subsumed by larger historical events. Contemporary Irish political scandals—such as the Beef Tribunal—provide essential context. In Farewell to the Flesh (1998), the narrative examines a contemporary Dublin property scheme—fraudulent, of course—that hinges on an inheritance from previous generations. As she returns to the Ireland of her childhood with her own infant daughter, the protagonist in this novel becomes involved, in her role as the solicitor for a convent, in complicated and obscure problems from the past that threaten her present well-being. In Time to Remember (1998), two narratives merge, one that of a young policewoman whose family has been killed in Irish sectarian violence, the other that of two elderly men whose lives have been dominated by their experiences as adolescents during World War II. This novel makes explicit how the cycle of retribution keeps history ever present. As Juliet Furbo’s government “minder” observes of the Irish conflict, “ ‘That bloody conflict has been going on for thirty years, a hundred, three

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hundred, six hundred. Who knows any more? Your family was killed because people remember too much, hate for too long. . . . Too many resentments, too much emotion, too much living in the past’ ” (299). The fifth and sixth novels, Walking on Water (2001) and Following the Wake (2002), feature male investigators and, overall, have less relevance for a study of feminist work.1 Sharyn McCrumb’s ballad novels model not only the strengths but also some of the hazards of the kind of historical research required by feminist historical crime fiction. McCrumb’s earliest work was in the crime genre, with the cozy Elizabeth MacPherson series (nine books, published between 1984 and 2000), and this is the series that Stephen Knight describes as “mildly feminist” (166). McCrumb also published two science fiction satires, in 1987 and 1992. The first ballad novel was published in 1990, and 2003’s Ghost Riders brings the total number of ballad novels published to seven. Her web site creates the impression that she never wrote crime fiction and in her recent public appearances, McCrumb has stated emphatically, when asked, that mysteries were an earlier phase of her writing career.2 This misrepresentation is belied by the publishing chronology outlined above: after the first ballad title was published, McCrumb published the second sci-fi satire and four more MacPherson titles, and she has accepted several major crime awards for her ballad books. Her renunciation of the crime genre is apparently complete with the 2005 publication of St.Dale, a pilgrimage-structured exploration of Dale Earnhardt’s importance to NASCAR fans. I find her disavowal of crime fiction ironic because her work is more sharply focused and responsible when it is linked to the structure of the genre. Comparing She Walks These Hills (1994) with the later Ghost Riders (2003) illustrates some of the changes. She Walks These Hills is comprised of many stories, each of which informs our understanding of the others and all of which come together by the novel’s end. The novel is notable for the sheer number of stories and the complexity of relationships among them, and the skillful way McCrumb has the characters and storylines converge. As Bertens and D’Haen note, in this novel, McCrumb “never los[es] sight of the necessary suspense” (73). The many characters in this novel are representative, and McCrumb uses them to shed light on the types they represent and often to subvert our expectations of these types. Names can serve as clues, status markers, even ironic comments. For example, one of the key figures in the novel is escaped convict Harm Sorley. “Harm” is an ironic prison nickname, but it is also simply the local pronunciation of his real name, Hiram. His daughter’s name is also an important marker. Chalarty Sorley/Charlotte Pentland was “saved” from her trailer life by Euell Pentland, who married her mother after Sorley’s conviction, and she has been transformed into a

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member of the middle class. And indeed she benefits from this transformation, becoming an educated and independent woman: something that readers can see although the narrative emphasizes the losses involved. Chalarty is the name she was given at birth, but her stepfather gentrified it to Charlotte; by the time of the novel’s current events, only her mother still uses the original name, perhaps as a minor rebellion against the stifling atmosphere of conformity in the Pentland house. She Walks These Hills also features (among many others) Katie Wyler, kidnapped by the Shawnee in 1779; city-boy doctoral student Jeremy Cobb; septuagenarian mountain woman Nora Bonesteel, who has “the Sight”; and Sabrina Harkryder, “trailer trash” married into McCrumb’s Wake County, Tennessee version of the Snopes family. Most of these characters challenge not only the expectations of other characters, but also those of readers. For example, after he meets Nora Bonesteel, Cobb mentions Thomas Wolfe, “the novelist” and is astonished when Bonesteel quotes from Wolfe’s work. “Jeremy stared. ‘You’ve read him?’ Nora nodded. ‘I had kin in Asheville’ ” (315). Cobb, initially a stereotypical graduate student geek, also surprises us. He is the one who first tells us the story of Katie Wyler, five full pages of imaginative and impassioned story-telling. One of his fellow grad students mocks him for the sincerity of his interest: “ ‘She’s a dissertation topic, Jeremy. You sound like you want to date her. Or maybe you’re going to try out for her role in the outdoor drama.’ ” (51–52). His advice to Cobb is “ ‘drink more beer and quit obsessing about your research topic’ ” (53), but instead Cobb decides to hike part of Katie’s route. The decisions made by these widely divergent characters provide plausible reasons for them to be converging on the old Sorley trailer at the end of the novel. By 2003’s Ghost Riders, the points of view in the novel are simply too numerous, and the inevitability of their presence is not clear, as it was in She Walks These Hills. Some figures appear once or twice, and are insufficiently connected to the main narrative; instead, they provide a vehicle for McCrumb’s criticism of contemporary society (Tom Gentry) and/or newcomers to the region (Stanley Ritter). In Ghost Riders, outsiders are cardboard cutouts who attend book discussion groups but are “surprised that any of us could read,” refer to locals openly as “rednecks,” know locals only by their service-job designations (“ ‘Shirley the maid. Wayne the stone mason. Cloyd the carpenter’ ”), and don’t know the difference between the local Cherokees and Southwestern tribes (129, 295 and 118, 296, 299–300). McCrumb’s Author’s Note at the end of the novel (327–39) advises readers not to bother her about alleged “mistakes in the text” (328). McCrumb’s loyal readers, trained to pay attention to the historical detail, may notice factual discrepancies and anachronistic


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attitudes. The staunchly Methodist Merrimon, teetotal on p. 40, casually tosses down quantities of whiskey with Zebulon Vance on p. 97. Merrimon’s father, we are told, is a Methodist minister, but McCrumb’s presentation of the social dynamics of Methodism seem anachronistic (40). Both McCrumb and O’Connor include contemporary frames for their historical stories. The presence of the contemporary frames is crucial because it makes explicit the connections between past and present and the process by which we construct, or reconstruct, our knowledge of history. Metaphors for the authors’ work at reconstruction abound. Susan Wittig Albert’s essay on McCrumb’s She Walks These Hills notes that “each individual narrative replicates, ballad-style, the central statement of the novel.” McCrumb’s own metaphor for her Appalachian novels is that of a quilt.3 Patricia Duncker offers a quilt image of her own: “the past is a quilt of traces and texts, ambiguous and often incoherent fragments out of which we make stories” (51). An especially pertinent Duncker image, one that captures the effect of that historical reconstruction, is of a fresco: “This work is like restoring the fresco, repainting the gaps. The completed picture is transformed; given other, different meanings” (50). The inclusion of women’s history does indeed transform our picture of the past. Region, Class, and Gender in McCrumb’s Ballad Novels McCrumb is not a declared feminist, and her primary allegiance is clearly to the region in which her ballad novels are set, the Appalachian Mountains near the Tennessee/North Carolina border. New approaches to history can benefit not just women, but those interested in other marginalized groups, as I mentioned in chapter 2. The covers of recent paperback reissues and the dust jackets of clothbound titles feature stunning photographs of mountain scenery notably devoid of human figures. The conservatism that almost always accompanies regional crime fiction, accurately described in Bertens and D’haen’s chapter “The Personal and the Regional: New Forms of Authenticity in Female Crime Writing,” is often at odds with the feminist impulse for change. Bertens and D’haen note that regionalism in crime fiction “is almost always conservative. It either wants to preserve a status quo that is threatened by current socio-economic developments or go back to an earlier status quo that has succumbed to the pressure of history” (74–75). Regionalism has always called upon the narrator to serve as mediator, a role Lanser discusses in relation to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford and Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs. Lanser’s focus is on the female community being represented, but the connections to regionalism are clear. Successful mediation, Lanser writes, requires that the narrator be

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inside enough to have knowledge of the society but simultaneously outside enough to be a reliable interpreter. In McCrumb’s ballad novels, the presence of the implied author is very strong. At times readers can find characters speaking or thinking phrases used by McCrumb in her own voice.4 This limits the efficacy of the narratives’ mediation between regional community and reader, and at times, the divide between locals and outsiders can appear no more complicated than some characters being unable to do anything right while others can do no wrong. In McCrumb’s Wake County, Bertens and D’haen write, “we are in a time warp and because of that the tone is apologetic—except with regard to city folks who live in the sterile present and who therefore have no excuse for doing what they do” (73). Stereotyping—of regions, types, social classes—is a frequent theme of McCrumb’s, and she is unforgiving of all outsiders. When Nora Bonesteel stereotypes, however, this is presented as mountain wisdom: “ ‘we tend to look on individuals as bearers of their family trademark, more or less.’ ” Hank the Yank finds this judgmental, but Bonesteel corrects him: “ ‘After fifty years and more, we just know how folks are, I guess’ ” (119). Her list is quite specific—buy your hunting dog from one family, do not lend money to another—and corroborated by the characters and events McCrumb presents in this novel and others (the Jessups and their hunting dogs we meet in The Ballad of Frankie Silver). Lanser’s description of how Jewett’s narrator “mediates the community’s life for an audience of outsiders, presenting its folkways, its values, its tales” (247) applies to McCrumb’s project. While it clear that her novels are intended to illuminate this region for her readers, the discrepancy between allegiance to locals and disrespect for outsiders (a category to which most of her readers belong), leads to inconsistencies and repetition. Readers are hectored on the local pronunciation of Appalachia, on the political implications of not pronouncing Appalachia like the natives do, on the use of terms like “redneck” and “hillbilly,” on the education of the region’s residents, and on the cars they drive (readers are told directly that yes, Tennesseans drive Mercedes). Bigotry is a frequent accusation in the ballad novels, but it is only made in one direction.5 A representative example, from The Songcatcher, is a New York stockbroker hiking the Appalachian Trail. He makes the mistake of pronouncing Appalachia like most of the country does, with a long a sound in the middle, and is treated to a lecture on his error. First, the local spokesman talks about the fraught politics of the competing names, Derry and Londonderry, for the conflicted city in Northern Ireland, making an unwarranted analogy. In that situation, the name chosen by the speaker is a deliberate, knowing statement of political allegiance: people naming Derry/Londonderry are aware that there are two competing designations and what those names


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represent. After making this dubious connection, the local informant segues into the heart of the message: “The way people say [Appalachia] tells us a lot about how they think about us. When we hear somebody say Appa-lay-chia, we know right away that the person we’re listening to is not on our side, and we hear a whole lot of cultural nuances about stereotyping and condescension and ethnic bigotry, just built right in. So you go on and call this place Appa-lay-chia if you want to. But you ought to know that by doing that you have made a po-li-ti-cal decision, and you’d better be prepared to live with the consequences.” (127, emphasis in the original)

There is an oddly provincial quality to the complaint here: it is hard to imagine that McCrumb believes one should mimic local pronunciations wherever one travels. McCrumb’s justification of the region and its past sometimes leads to endorsements of destructive attitudes and behaviors. “Attitudes that elsewhere would be classified as pathological are accepted (and described) with great serenity,” Bertens and D’haen note: their example is the custom of halloing the house so as not to get shot at (74). I see McCrumb’s presentation of Sabrina’s murder of her child as a significant example of this tendency. Sabrina is justified or exculpated through the contrived connection to a historical heroine, even though the novel elsewhere demonstrates that times have changed—and thus our contemporary child-killer should be judged differently than Katie Wyler. The connection between the two women is one deliberately created and emphasized by McCrumb. In James Thom’s Follow the River, one of McCrumb’s main sources for the Wyler story, the historical Mary Draper Ingles left her infant daughter behind in the care of a Shawnee woman because she knew that an infant would never survive such a trip and her presence would probably doom her mother as well. The murder is an element added by McCrumb, presumably in order to construct that parallel with Sabrina Harkryder. Bertens and D’haen note that “it would be inaccurate to say that She Walks These Hills romanticizes the past. McCrumb does not gloss over its terrible injustices and cruelty. However, the novel glorifies the past, presenting it as a time when things were starker, less bland—in a sense more real” (74). This glorification of the past leads to some of the weaknesses, from a feminist point of view, in the ballad novels. These weaknesses are exacerbated when socioeconomic class is added to the mix. In The Ballad of Frankie Silver, Sheriff Arrowood muses over criminal nature, and seems to conclude (surprisingly for a law officer) that criminals are not to blame for their crimes, but their circumstances are: “most law-abiding citizens were as fortunate as they were virtuous. Any one bit

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of luck . . . could derail the kind of tragedy that happened to people less blessed” (90). Note the passive “happened,” the emphasis on luck. Burgess Gaither, the novel’s common sense focalizer for Frankie’s era, muses in a similar fashion that his wife and sisters-in-law are protected from the need to commit crimes by their privileged status (214). The final chapter relating to Frankie’s era, “Afterward,” is primarily devoted to the story of William Waightstill Avery. This story provides an extended example of McCrumb’s class and regional priorities, and yet the story is one that demands to be read through gender as well. Avery gets away with murder, acquitted by a jury of his peers in ten minutes. Gaither’s perspective emphasizes that these jurors were his peers because they were men of the town, all known to Avery, in contrast to Frankie Silver’s relation to her jury as a mountain person lacking social and financial resources. And yet the successful premise of Avery’s defense is that a man has an obligation to kill another man if his honor is at stake, a defense available only to men of a certain standing. Frankie Silver’s jurors were indeed town-dwellers—but they were also all men. Martha Ayers occasionally speaks to feminist issues in the novel, but McCrumb’s emphasis on the mountain/flatlander conflict obscures feminist interpretation of Frankie’s story. My critique of McCrumb’s partisan regionalism may raise the question of her novels’ role in my study, especially since they subordinate both feminist and genre strictures to regional loyalty. Her work belongs here because it models the pertinent methods of historical research—both the benefits and the liabilities of it—and it examines the job of the historical researcher working in areas (with people) previously marginalized. Her novels openly address issues of transmission of historical information, pointing out the presence of omissions and errors. Her university librarian and expert on the region’s civil war experience in Ghost Riders, Michael Baird, makes light of the historical record: “ ‘History is just what people write down, and sometimes they get it wrong. Does it really matter whether it was James Arrowood or Edmond Arrowood who died at Waynesville? He’s still just a name on a roster’ ” (293). Her novels not only show how the record can be passed on unofficially but also how it can be distorted during that process. In The Ballad of Frankie Silver, Martha Ayers reports that there are no books on the Frankie Silver case, but she brings an older woman who knows the story from her grandmother to tell it to the Sheriff, a method of transmission valued elsewhere in McCrumb’s work. In this instance, however, Spencer Arrowood and Doctor Banner dismiss the woman’s story as hopelessly corrupted: the last name, Silvers, is different, and lines from popular songs have been introduced.6


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In The Songcatcher, McCrumb goes further and gives readers a vision of how such distortion might be deliberate. Late nineteenth-century Zeb McCourry is perplexed by the oddities of the “outlanders” staying at the Cloudland Hotel, and learns to tell them lies. These outsiders receive the same treatment McCrumb gives her contemporary outsiders: they are stupid, interfering, and insulting. When Zeb quotes Shakespeare, one lady exclaims “ ‘they do speak every bit as quaint as Shakespeare’ ” and Zeb is too polite to tell her it is Shakespeare (261–62). The steady portrait of wise mountain boy and idiotic Bostonian ladies is sometimes marred, however: “I told them my name was Zebulon, and they thought that was ‘quite biblical’ so I didn’t mention the North Carolina governor who’d had the same name, for fear of disillusioning the ladies” (262). “The ladies” have a point, because the name does not merely “sound” Biblical, it is: Zebulun is one of Jacob’s sons and thus the founder of one of the tribes of Israel. The target is uncertain; in this scene, McCrumb does not seem to be making a point about dissimilar knowledge, but about ignorance versus knowledge. In any case, after his conversation with them, he is advised by General Wilder to do as the other mountain boys do: tell lies.7 Of particular interest to the historical novelist is the fact that these visitors are keeping a journal, recording their observations about the people and the land, even recording songs in it. This is just the kind of primary material valued by the contemporary historical novelist, and McCrumb suggests convincingly just how worthless such sources may be. These limitations, however, serve to contextualize the strengths of McCrumb’s research methods. In the ballad novels, she uses a variety of narrative tools, including legal documents, fictionalized diaries, folktales, and ballad lyrics to convey historical information and to create links between that past and contemporary life. These textual strategies mirror her approach to research. Her historical research allows her crime novels to create a credible sense of the past, while the crime plots emphasize the links between the long ago “then” and our “now.” Her research materials are eclectic, comprising traditional published sources and archival materials, but also music, myth, and folklore. In her acknowledgments to She Walks These Hills, McCrumb writes that “in addition to hymns, family legends, mountain lore, and tales gathered from people I know, I also consulted the following works, listed here for the benefit of those who want to ‘hunt their own knowledge’ ” (335). The dozen books she lists are thus presented as a starting point for interested readers, but of course they are also gestures toward credibility and documentation of her sources. The Ballad of Frankie Silver draws upon folktale, ballad, and a slew of more traditional historical sources (both published works and unpublished manuscript sources) to create a compelling parallel between frontier justice in the 1830s and the

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more sophisticated legal system of the late twentieth century. In The Songcatcher, in addition to all those sources, McCrumb also draws on what she has learned of her own family history, making an even tighter circle of history, current events, and personal identity. Jeremy Cobb’s dissertation research provides an opportunity for McCrumb to comment on the relationship between private knowledge and public credibility. Fascinated by the story of Katie Wyler, and frustrated by his failure to understand her fate in spite of his extensive knowledge of the case, he literally “hits the trail” and follows her route to gain insight. But how to cite such knowledge in the dissertation bibliography? After his supernatural experience in the company of Sabrina Harkryder, and the revelations from Nora Bonesteel, he can’t figure out how to cite that knowledge, either. Nora Bonesteel understands: “I actually found her,” he said to Nora Bonesteel, who was weaving on her loom. “She spoke to me. I wish I could say so in my dissertation.” “No, I don’t suppose your college would care much for that,” said Nora. “But you could tell people about the child, I think. Explain why she died. I’ll be your reference.” “I guess I could. Oral history from the region.” (329)

Here we see McCrumb valuing unorthodox sources of knowledge—the self-described computer-camp geek hiking the Appalachian Trail, experiencing a visitation from the past, and meeting an old woman who gives him the key to making sense of the tale—and also acknowledging conventions and standards for research. (Her own research, as I have suggested, carefully represents scholarly work alongside the more offbeat or intuitive sources.) Both Cobb and Bonesteel know what he can and cannot cite in his dissertation, and her offer to “be [his] reference” translates neatly into “oral history from the region.” What Nora Bonesteel tells him about the subject of his own dissertation is simply the most dramatic instance of how the voices of women in this novel link together past and present. “ ‘It wasn’t the kind of thing anybody would write in the history books,’ ” Nora Bonesteel tells him, in another allusion to that divide between private knowledge and official public documentation “ ‘but the people in these mountains always knew. The women did, anyhow. I had it from my grandmother long ago’ ” (318). Bonesteel invokes both mountain wisdom and women’s lore to explain the apparently inexplicable and demonstrates neatly that what is written in the history books is not the last word. The secret? Katie Wyler was pregnant at the time of her abduction; after that incredible journey home, her betrothed murders her because she had killed the child in order to make the trip home to him.


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In fact, Bonesteel believes Jeremy and Sabrina heard Katie speak because of Sabrina’s bond with Katie; she too has killed her own child. Bonesteel links past and present in a couple of important ways, for the benefit of Jeremy Cobb and for readers. First, when Cobb says that he wanted to know what Katie was like, Bonesteel draws his attention to Sabrina as a present-day model. He is incredulous, but Bonesteel is gently adamant that Sabrina is “ ‘Katie all over again. She was a scrawny little thing, too, all hair and eyes—and backbone, Katie was’ ” (317). This description, and Sabrina’s appearance, are considerably at odds with Cobb’s own mental portrait of Katie Wyler, given much earlier in the novel: “he knew that she was his own age, and he always saw her very clearly— usually with long dark hair and a heart-shaped face with determined blue eyes that seemed to be staring far into the distance” (50). This image, which might have been taken from the cover of a romance novel, seems slightly unreal even to Cobb, but he is still shocked by Bonesteel’s more pragmatic vision of her.8 Later, drawing our attention to another aspect of the Sabrina/Katie parallel, Bonesteel asserts matter-of-factly that Tracy Harkryder, who Sheriff Spencer Arrowood calls Sabrina’s “ ‘bastard of a husband’ ” (325), “ ‘mustn’t be let into the jail to see her’ ” (319), calling up the specter of male violence turning again against the victims of its own making. Nora Bonesteel, with the power of “the sight,” is not the only woman to speak in ways that connect past and present. Katie Wyler herself, the one who “walks these hills,” literally speaks to Cobb and Sabrina. Sabrina, too, shows herself unintimidated by the past, understanding intuitively how attitudes and behaviors are recycled. As Jeremy Cobb expounds upon his Katie Wyler theories, a subject that Sabrina encourages rather than be asked questions about her own situation, he says, “ ‘At first I thought she might have been raped by the Shawnee, and that he killed her for being ‘unfaithful.’ Men had weird ideas about sex back then.’ Sabrina’s look was scornful. ‘Like they don’t now?’ Jeremy sighed” (293). As he speculates further about the motives driving the actions of those long ago people, and how they could have resulted in her murder, Sabrina cuts through much of his either/or thinking to observe tartly that “ ‘choices aren’t always that simple, mister’ ” (294). Her life has taught her that “ ‘people can get caught between a rock and a hard place, and then there’s no right answers without somebody getting hurt’ ” (294). Readers are immediately reminded of the truth of this, as their conversation is broken off by the sight of smoke “over yonder.” The smoke comes from the Sorley’s old trailer, the site of about half a dozen rocks and hard places (and chickens coming home to roost). And thus we are reminded of the wisdom of common sense, and asked to consider the interconnected workings of past and present.

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Past, Present, and Future in Gemma O’Connor’s Novels Patricia Duncker characterizes several approaches to historical fiction in her essay, “Fictions and Histories.” The importance of these approaches to Duncker is their relation to the present and the future—how do we act upon our knowledge of the past? In her analysis, she writes, The writers of historical fiction that I find most suspect is the History Enables Us to See Essential Truths More Clearly school. . . . The trap here becomes clear when we ask what remains unchanged, however far we venture into the past. The answer is always the same: human nature and the most fundamental passions of the human heart. This is the most conservative political conclusion of all and perhaps the most mendacious. If we do not change now, then we are looking at nothing but tragedy and general catastrophe. To argue that we, as human beings, have not changed our behaviour, customs and practices, at the very least, is to misread the facts. (38)

Because O’Connor does show the immense changes in twentieth-century Irish culture, this gives added weight to the points she makes about areas that have not changed because of a deliberate clinging to the past. And this is where O’Connor’s novels reveal their sophisticated understanding of the relation between past and present. In the Author’s Note at the end of The Ballad of Frankie Silver, McCrumb makes the type of argument described above by Duncker. McCrumb tells readers that When I began researching the life and death of Frankie Silver, I thought I was looking into a fascinating riddle concerning a long-ago murder on the frontier, a tragic incident but only a minor curiosity in North Carolina’s pioneer history. As I delved deeper into the story, I began to think that the case was really about the poor people as defendants and rich people as officers of the court, about Celt versus English values in developing America, about mountain people versus the “flatlanders” in any culture. . . . I concluded that Frankie Silver had much to tell us about equal justice under the law, and that not much has changed since she went to her death on a bright July afternoon 164 years ago. (393)

And yet all the details of her contemporary parallel to Frankie, Lafayette Harkryder, show convincingly just how much has changed.9 The forces of social change have fundamentally altered the grounds on which a convicted felon would be given the death penalty, and minimized the likelihood of that sentence being carried out after being pronounced. Harkryder himself waits for the system to continue its slow workings on his behalf, knowing that it is a system in which “any little quibble could tie the court up for a year or more” (104). This change is given attention through the thoughts


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of both Fate Harkryder and Sheriff Arrowood (208, 248–50, 381–82), and Arrowood explicitly contrasts the fate of Frankie Silver with the fate of those in the contemporary judicial system. McCrumb’s research into the legal system of 1830s North Carolina and into death row inmates of 1990s Tennessee lends her stories a verisimilitude that bears out the real changes that have occurred in spite of her stated opinion that “not much has changed.” Her care in research and commitment to authentic representation actually trump her sentiments. Gemma O’Connor uses the mystery genre to explore the importance of history to the contemporary experiences of Irish women. The female protagonists of her crime novels are compelled to undertake difficult, often dangerous, personal odysseys. They must negotiate a safe path through the pitfalls of the past (which turns out to be never really past, but a still-potent force) while simultaneously grappling with the geography of their (mostly) Irish pasts and (mostly) English present lives. The (London) Times review of her third novel speculates that she has “created a new mini-genre, the Anglo-Irish crime novel” (Marcel Berlins, review of Farewell). After all, the reviewer notes, “the novel flits between the two countries not just geographically, but in style and mood. On top of a relatively traditional Oxford-based mystery is heaped a flamboyantly woven, very Irish tale. . . . The result is fresh, bleak and constantly enjoyable.” How does O’Connor create a coherent narrative from so many diverse elements? I would like to consider a couple of the narrative strategies that she uses to construct provocative portraits of contemporary women ambushed— temporarily—by the past. O’Connor’s novels make interesting use of the kind of documentary evidence sometimes used in crime fiction to create verisimilitude. Her use of textual elements like letters, newspaper notices, personal journals, and even chapter epigraphs develops character and theme but sometimes also raises doubts about the authority usually conveyed by such devices. One interesting example in Sins of Omission is the letter written by Grace Hartfield that provides both the first and the last words of the novel. The second half of the letter is presented as a “prologue,” and picks up in the midst of the text. Not only does the letter begin in what is clearly the middle of a story, both initial ellipses and a lower-case letter are used to draw our attention to the omission of earlier material. The identities of both writer and intended recipient are unclear initially, but the letter’s closing signature is Grace Hartfield, Ballymahon. Sunday, 29th October, 1990.

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At the end of the novel, as “envoi,” we read the beginning of the letter, headed “Hallowe’en, 1990” and addressed “Dear Livy.” This letter is Grace Hartfield’s explanation of events, written for the benefit of Cas Van Rijn’s surviving business/personal partner, Livy Hanning. It serves at least two purposes germane to the genre—initially, it creates suspense and in the end, it provides extra definition to the traditional crime novel explanation scene. There are several noteworthy features to O’Connor’s use of this device. By introducing the story in the middle, curiosity is aroused; when we properly meet Grace, in chapter 2, she is living in Ealing, London W13, “pure Betjeman” territory as it is later described in Falls the Shadow (276). Why then is she writing from Ballymahon? The section that closes the novel, the first half of the letter, adds an additional layer of explanation, as Grace has already had some “debriefing” with Father Crowley. First, it suggests that women can discern a fuller truth; the psychological depth important throughout the novel is displayed more fully in the letter to Livy than in Grace’s explanation to the priest. The information in the letter, and Grace’s attitude toward the events she describes, also demonstrate Grace’s personal odyssey from a sheltered London housewife to an independent woman coming to terms with her family’s deadly secrets and her own national background. At the same time, however, the documentary authority of the letter is undermined by a discrepancy in the repeated section; the text is not identical in both places. In the prologue, the letter’s phrasing is “. . . the point is, if he had not been speaking Dutch the first time they met, she would not have assumed him to be Dutch” while in the conclusion it reads “You see, Livy, if he had not been speaking Dutch . . .” The epigraphs in Sins of Omission and Farewell to the Flesh are noteworthy for their role in developing the crime plot but also for the way they gesture toward literary fiction. In Sins of Omission, the epigraphs are a mix of extracts from antiquarian book catalogs and snippets of letters to and/or replies from an “agony aunt” column. Grace Hartfield’s chapters have the book catalog epigraphs whereas Bid’s chapters (and Eileen’s small section) have the agony aunt ones. Bid’s job was writing such a column for a woman’s magazine in London; the extracts are fictional, presumably to be taken as Bid’s own work. If that is the case, it underlines very heavily how being able to understand other people’s problems—particularly problems with badly behaved lovers and domineering mothers—did not help Bid at all in her own life. The correspondence between epigraph and chapter events is clear and direct: the advice given in the epigraph, if followed by Bid, would go a long way toward solving the particular problem presented in the chapter. Because they are tailor-made fictional examples, these epigraphs are slightly unusual, creating a means of understanding Bid’s


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character and the novel’s themes of dangerous ignorance and confusion, but not drawing on the authority of the “real” or nonfictional. The book catalog entries are even more intriguing, including as they do not only the technical terms of antiquarian bookselling (“slightly foxed,” “very fine”) but also describing books in terms suggestive for the chapter events. For example, the epigraph to the chapter in which Grace is first told about Cas Van Rijn and his relationship with her niece reads “DU MAURIER, George. TRILBY, the tragic story of Trilby and Svengali. Limited edition, wood engraved illustrations and border, original holland backed boards, corners rubbed, unopened.” (117). Van Rijn “making over” Bid, his age and sophistication compared to her youth and naivete, make the epigraph directive rather than suggestive. Grace Hartfield herself is in the bookselling trade, and her catalogs are discussed in the text. As with the advice column attributable to Bid, these books are presumably from Grace’s business. In fact, some of the books described (the ones on lace, for example) the reader knows to be in her possession. It makes an interesting connection between the professional competence of these women—it is made clear that both are very good at what they do—and their temporary inability to bring that kind of competence to bear on their own lives. On a local level, each epigraph sets a kind of mini-theme for each chapter, a foothold for the reader that sometimes is clear from the very beginning (as in the Trilby example cited above) and sometimes one that only gradually comes into focus as the chapter is read. In Farewell to the Flesh, O’Connor also branches out into published or public sources for material. Biblical and literary quotations, definitions from the OED, legal terms, canon law, and land registry materials are used to gently direct the reader’s attention toward the relevant issues while underscoring common features of human behavior in various social and legal contexts. For example, she uses Song of Songs for a series of epigraphs that create multiple layers of meaning. The first uses are for two chapters in which Tess considers the death of Marcus Rogerson, the father of her child (chapters 1 and 2); then, as one of Jeddie’s book catalog entries, describing an “elaborately printed and decorated” eighteenth-century edition of Song of Songs (chapter 17); and finally, for two chapters relating to her new relationship with Owen Rogerson (chapters 25 and 30). The epigraphs signal clearly the shifts taking place within the novel and its protagonist. The book catalog entry on Song of Songs provides context not just for the events within the novel, but also for the extracts from that source used as epigraphs for other chapters. Similarly, O’Connor gives the OED definition of canon law in the epigraph to chapter 6, then offers two examples of canon law in the epigraphs to chapters 11 and 37. Taken as a group, the sources are an intriguing mix of authentic and fictional, and not all turn out

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to be what a casual reader might assume them to be. O’Connor mimics precisely the voice of local history for the epigraph to chapter 13, “taken from” the Chipping Stebton Local History Record, and pertinent news is offered from the “Irish Newsheet.” Her main source of epigraphs relating to land law comes from Wylie’s Irish Land Law; Professor John Wylie is the leading authority on Irish land law and conveyancing, and this work is a standard text for law students and practicing solicitors. The legal implications of land sales and zoning rulings are visibly relevant from the beginning, and some of the epigraphs provide concise information about current practice in these areas. Some of the other relevant issues only come into view gradually, like antiquarian erotica and the complicated family relationships among the nineteenth-century Stebtons and Eldersons. The structure of the crime plot (including a few red herrings), and the intriguing epigraphs, lead readers to make these discoveries actively rather than passively. In Farewell to the Flesh, we find more antiquarian book catalog copy, this time from Jeddie Hillyard’s catalog-only business specializing in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century erotica. These are explicitly identified as being from her catalog, and the first of them are presented before Tess Callaway learns the nature of Jeddie’s specialization. This specialization is pertinent to the plot, and the fate of the convent; presented in this way, it is a clue for the alert reader. O’Connor’s presentation is clever and compelling; my analysis here is no match for the pleasure of its intricacies but is intended to show how the complex structure is pieced together. The first two references are epigraphs from the “A d’A Cat.,” found in chapters 7 and 8 (pp. 89 and 93). Chapter 7 presents Jeddie Hillyard’s “history” of her family home while chapter 8 introduces readers to the character of Jeddie and the library of her family home. The item cataloged in the epigraph to chapter 8 is by Pietro di Aretino. The conjunctions are certainly suggestive, but no more than that—the catalog is still only identified as “A d’A.” The next references are similarly oblique; Jeddie muses about her tastes in books and “sins of the flesh” (131), and Marcus suggests “carefully” that Tess ask Grace Hartfield what are Jeddie’s “bibliographical interests” (149). Nearly thirty pages later, readers are given another epigraph from the “A d’A Cat.,” this one in Italian (175). In this chapter, Grace gives Tess the full name of Jeddie’s business, Amici d’Aretino, but describes her specialties rather coyly as “foreign language editions” and “early illustrated books” (179–80). The most direct approach to the subject in this chapter is the word “clandestine” as a description of her trade. The next item O’Connor offers is a catalog entry for chapter 17, this being the Song of Songs entry mentioned above. The intensity increases with Tess’s next encounter with Aretino; the papers used to line the basket of produce given her by the sisters are taken


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from Jeddie’s notes. Tess fortuitously notices the paper, but can make little out of its fragmented words. The word Aretino snags at her memory, but she does not know what Aretino is: “A place? A name?” (212). Twenty pages later, Tess and the readers get a direct explanation—at long last— from a bookseller friend of Tess’s in Ireland, but before that O’Connor provides two more epigraphs. The first is from the catalog, a highly suggestive entry: “Venus dans le Cloître ou la Religieuse en Chemise” (214). The next is an unattributed source on the amusing names given to “censored libraries” (221). After the bookselling friend explains the allusion made by Jeddie’s business name, and establishes the high monetary value of this category of books, Tess returns again to those basket-lining notes, this time with a clearer idea of what they might signify. This reference is followed by the final pertinent epigraph (chapter 23), which discusses the odd and eclectic contents of the category “erotica.” Next O’Connor reveals, through Tess and Grace, Jeddie’s theft of erotica from the convent—and what is a convent doing with erotica?—and the cash value of those thefts. That one million pounds, however, is dwarfed by “certain land values around her native town” of Dublin (267). Now the connections are in sharp focus, and Tess is ready to learn about the secret shelves in the Stebton Place library (which readers learned about in chapter 8). All that remains is for the deferred, but inevitable, denouement of chapter 38, when O’Connor provides Adelaide Stebton’s nineteenth-century testimony that the erotica were her father’s “dowry,” and Sister Mary-Rose’s knowledge of Jeddie’s thefts. The erotica were a conundrum for the founder of Holy Retreat and the nuns who followed her; an embarrassment, but an asset. When Jeddie Hillyard arrived, knowing about the secret shelves and their likely holdings, she was simply fulfilling the prediction Adelaide Stebton made in her testimony—the one I have used as an epigraph to this chapter.10 Charting the development of this thread in Farewell to the Flesh reveals O’Connor’s sophisticated use of narrative strategies that create suspense, invite readers to analyze characters, events, and contexts, and to observe closely how women chart their way through shark-infested waters. The crime genre itself confers credibility on the novel’s basic problems and events, but these kinds of narrative devices are one of several ways O’Connor makes specific events and behavior seem credible to the reader. I began this chapter with one of Patricia Duncker’s ideas about historical fiction; A. S. Byatt’s On Histories and Stories also offers pertinent structural tools. She characterizes one approach to historical fiction as “looking for the source of evil in time, backwards through memory” (35). O’Connor’s novels represent that attitude toward history, but even more importantly, they embody a kind of two-way traffic between past and present, where we

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see explanations being sought in the past but also unwanted disruptions of the present by the past. Farewell to the Flesh begins with a chapter entitled “prologue” dated October 29, 1996; it is followed by a chapter with an earlier date (“Late August–Early September, 1996”), and events of the prologue turn out to be in the middle of novel’s events. The nonstandard chronological relation of the prologue to the rest of the novel underscores the powerful intrusion of the past that is documented in that prologue: the unexpected extra coffin that is (literally) uncovered when the graveyard is being exhumed for removal to a new site. The mysterious coffin immediately stands out to everyone present, from the gravediggers to the nuns, for it is made of lead, rather than the wooden coffins used for the nuns. O’Connor’s description of the event is not original—using words like foreboding and ominous—but the scene ends with a challenge characteristic of O’Connor: the undertaker in charge says “ ‘You’re going to have to check the convent records again. Aren’t you, Reverend Mother?’ ” (17). It is a brilliantly suspenseful opening, but O’Connor takes readers next to Tess Callaway in Oxford a couple of months earlier to show us the circumstances of her domestic life. The lead coffin, which turns out to have corroborative value of significant family facts, is used to tantalize readers throughout the book, with the final explanation reserved for chapter 38. The lead coffin is first mentioned in the prologue, where the Guardian Mother seems to connect it to wealth and extravagance; when the discovery is retold later in the novel, there is a brief discussion of lead coffins that offers three possible significations: wealth, overseas burial, and something darker hinted at by the undertaker.11 The epigraph to chapter 36 suggests yet another meaning: lead was used to deter grave-robbers. Perhaps this is what the undertaker hinted at? Perhaps this is what Tess connects in her mind specifically with burial in Oxfordshire? Or perhaps there will be a discovery when the coffin is opened? Only in chapter 38, in the reproduced testimony of the convent’s founder, do readers learn the truth, which is a compound of all these earlier suggestions yet matches none of them completely: the lead is there because the body of Adelaide Stebton’s mother waited in the warm weather for a month for word from Ryland Stebton to send for it. When the body became unpleasant, the lead sheathing became necessary. The coffin itself leads to the discovery of problems arising from actions taken 150 years earlier; its physical presence forces the uncovering of facts, events, and emotions. The story of the coffin’s discovery is first laid out in the prologue, and it is developed further in chapter 31. Part of the story is retold, in slightly different terms; the Mother Guardian’s response to the discovery, for example, is put in different words and in a different emotional register. The nun seems more knowing, more angry and less agitated


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in the chapter 31 version, and Tess is amazed at how quickly the nun “grasped the implication of this strange incident” in the second telling of the tale (346). It is almost as if the characters of the nun and the lawyer are mirroring the reader’s greater knowledge at this point in the novel’s development, or as if the story has been influenced by the narrative discourse. The information that is brought to light through the device of the found coffin is part of an important theme in the novel: O’Connor’s examination of two ancient identities for women, those of cloistered contemplative and mother. The founder of Holy Retreat built safeguards for the women into the structures of Holy Retreat, structures that still serve in the 1990s and permit the survival of the order in spite of the events narrated in the novel. The founder’s own family experience may have made her more aware of the need for such protection, and certainly she was prescient in fearing trouble later on. Legally trained Tess notices the wisdom of Adelaide Stebton’s arrangements from the beginning: she “had been extraordinarily far-sighted in a period when women had few rights over the direction of their lives and none at all over their own property or income” (64–65). O’Connor sketches the ways female religious communities were taken over by the (male) church in nineteenth-century Ireland, but Stebton resisted the pressure to put her little order under the pastoral and financial jurisdiction of the bishop. As Tess works on the legal issues, she discovers how effective Stebton’s structures were at deflecting male takeover—and how irritating the local church men find that. Father Keane in the Diocesan Office, for example, was outraged that the nuns were not beholden to the bishop. And the unnatural way they persisted in their foolishness. As he explained over and over, they had uniquely retained the ownership of their land from the time of the convent’s foundation. And their autonomy. Something which clearly rankled with the elderly priest. Independence in women was a dangerous precedent but in nuns it was outrageous and not to be borne. (187)

Although Holy Retreat is a contemplative order, the nuns are older, educated, and capable of managing the convent businesses—growing herbs and baking communion hosts to be sold—and its endowment. Part of Stebton’s genius was in the system of Trusteeship she established, a system that prevents outsiders from exerting any control; there are three trustees, on rotating ten-year appointments, to be held only by nuns of Holy Retreat. Tess tells Owen Rogerson that “the priest who told me was outraged at their temerity. . . . But the system has worked well for them over the years” (294). Though Tess admires their administrative model, she struggles a bit with the personal aspects of Holy Retreat. In the beginning, she is made

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uncomfortable with their enclosure. Confronted by their insistence on staying behind screens, she thinks that “withdraw seemed too passive for those sinister grilles. Exclude seemed nearer the mark” (73). Later, in conversation with one of the nuns, Tess is told that while the nuns are aware of the value of what they are turning away from when they choose the contemplative life, their spiritual faith and their belief in the power of prayer make it the right choice for them (200). Tess learns to accept as normal her condition of motherhood, with all the craziness that comes with it, partly through her interactions with the nuns at Holy Retreat and their reminders to her that motherhood—like being a contemplative—is a total package. Tess, with her professional expertise, is a counterpoint to the nuns with their commitment to prayer. She keeps herself from detailing to a skeptical nun “the superiority of both her training and her brain-power” (80) to that of the male solicitor she is replacing, but readers are aware of her elite professional status nonetheless. By novel’s end, she has come to respect, without being able to explain, the power and value of the contemplative life. After the rogue coffin has been dealt with, Tess’s thoughts invite us to see the Mother Guardian and herself in counterpoint. Thinking about the all-encompassing nature of motherhood, she is startled by her glimpse of “the eloquence and power of the nun’s silence” (353). She even thinks of them in tandem, when “the folds of nun’s voluminous cloak and Tess’s long black coat intermingled” (354). The nuns, mourning their founder, represent a sight “at once exclusive and so primitive that she stood transfixed until they disappeared into the chapel” (357). O’Connor, in drawing parallels to their timeless female appearance, mentions Arab women and biblical women. The novel seems to ask readers to consider essential, enduring female roles—nuns, mothers, wives—in juxtaposition with contemporary images of high-class lawyers and single mothers juggling daycare and job. Indeed, it is important that O’Connor’s protagonists, especially in the first three novels, are successful professional women. Juliet Furbo, in the fourth novel, Time to Remember, has a police career that she gives up by novel’s end—more emphasis is placed on her status as victim of the troubles and her failure to achieve the university degree she had all but earned. It is characteristic of O’Connor, however, that even Juliet’s family troubles are described in a way that link the personal to the larger political/historical moment: her father “ ‘liked excitement,’ ” he “ ‘ played one side against the other’ ” and “ ‘exposed his family’ ” to the danger that literally blew them up (301, 300). Her story partly reflects the public face of endless sectarian violence and retribution, but it also has a more private or personal component, as her father was a man willing to jeopardize the future of his children because he was seduced by excitement. In Sins of Omission, Grace Hartfield


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runs a successful antiquarian book business by herself; in Falls the Shadow, Nell Gilmore works for an international freight forwarding company and is named “operations director for the UK” (314, emphasis in the original) as she is trying to solve the mystery of her mother’s death, thus becoming the first woman to sit on the company’s board. In Farewell to the Flesh, Tess Callaway is a successful solicitor who enjoys her work for the Crown Prosecution Service, and it is her professional expertise that allows her to take part in the convent story. The conventions of the crime novel allow a degree of intensity not credible in straight fiction; the problems that confront these women would seem melodramatic or farfetched without the plot scaffolding provided by crime fiction. The character of Grace Hartfield is one of the most interesting figures to appear in any nonseries group of crime novels of which I am aware. She appears in every novel except Time to Remember. She is a remarkable development of the recurring character that is a staple of crime fiction, as she does not take responsibility for the investigations, nor does she remain static. Her life improves, and her wanderings over the course of three books take her to the kind of life many would envy. In Sins of Omission, Grace has been left by her husband and learns that her long-dead sister in fact had only recently died, and the niece she never knew of has committed suicide. She embarks on a quest for the truth, but hardly feels up to the job: “She could not tell whether past or present was the more threatening, nor admit that the one might have some bearing on the other” (31–32). She does find answers, none of them pleasant, but finally is ready to sort out her own conflicted identity. Without her own awareness of the change, let alone control over it, Grainne Sullivan had turned into Grace Hartfield. At novel’s end, however, she is ready (as the Dublin priest quips) to “help [Grainne] grow into grace” (519). Grace also appears in the next two novels, as a source of expertise on antiquarian books and bookbinding relevant to the plots. In Falls the Shadow, she helps Nell Gilmore locate the mysterious love of her mother’s life; in Farewell to the Flesh, she has a professional connection with Jeddie Hillyard, whom Tess Callaway is trying to contact. As she serves her role in the plots, readers also learn about the changing circumstances of her life. In the second novel, we learn that she has spent time in the United States with the American librarian she met during her own search and that they plan to open a shop in Oxford; in the third, Grace and Murray have their shop established in Walton Street and are happily married. In the fifth and sixth titles, readers learn of some strains in the marriage, and their bookselling business has been reduced from a shop to a home-based business. The pattern of each protagonist is thus extrapolated in mostly positive ways, but the air of “happily ever after” is made more realistic by

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O’Connor’s skillful use of the crime genre, for while each book does offer a love story, these are in the spirit of romances in mystery, connected integrally to the crime plot. These romances are forward looking in that the protagonists only achieve their personal happiness after they have faced the unpleasant truths they had earlier avoided and taken action themselves to restructure their lives. Further, O’Connor insists on the complexities of fully adult relationships, and makes a case for the powerfully rewarding value of committed relationships between equals. Tess Callaway, in Farewell to the Flesh, spends ten years with Marcus Rogerson, never marrying him but giving up her London-based career and becoming pregnant shortly before his death in a motorcycle accident. The motorcycle, his infidelities, their failure to commit to marriage are all eventually understood by Tess as symptoms of the inequality of their relationship. She chose an exciting but reckless man, for whom her practicality and stability were a balancing force. By the novel’s end, she has discovered that “passion and consideration” are not mutually exclusive, that one can have a passionate relationship with someone who is also dependable and respectable. She remembers the moments of happiness with Marcus, but feels that “marriage is a foreign language I did not take trouble enough to learn” (336, 444). At novel’s end, she is poised to have a full, rewarding, and married relationship with Owen Rogerson. Like King and Douglas, O’Connor makes a convincing case for the pleasures to be enjoyed by both partners in a committed relationship of equals. * * * In their historical/contemporary crime novels, both Sharyn McCrumb and Gemma O’Connor illuminate the interconnections between past and present. McCrumb models in her own research, and demonstrates in her novels, the processes of historical recovery and reimagining. O’Connor’s novels reveal a sophisticated analysis of the kinds of documentary evidence researchers rely upon, and the processes by which that evidence is discovered and put to use. Libraries may be repositories of research materials and learning, but they may also hide collections of expensive erotica. Journals, diaries, and letters may provide invaluable information, but they may also be false or misleading. When Jeddie Hillyard says she is researching a book on women contemplatives, she is not performing the same kind of work as her creator, Gemma O’Connor.12 McCrumb’s ballad series has achieved both commercial and critical success, showing that these books speak effectively to a large audience. McCrumb says of her ballad novels that “it is from the family stories, the traditional music, and from my own careful research of the history,


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folklore, and geography of the region that I gather the squares for these literary quilts” (novelist_land.asp). Like a quilt, She Walks These Hills is beautiful yet functional, more than the sum of its diverse parts. Jeremy Cobb’s problems of attribution and citation are instructive here. Both types of knowledge serve him, the scholarly and the nonscholarly. Either type alone would be an incomplete record of what he has learned, and of Katie Wyler’s story. This insight is crucial to those branches of historical crime fiction that seek to renegotiate our understanding of the past. Feminist historical crime writers know that the standard histories are incomplete and seek to reconstruct a fuller record, one that includes the kind of knowledge represented by Nora Bonesteel but carefully woven together with traditional, scholarly research. O’Connor’s protagonists—strong, professional women facing nearly insurmountable problems from the past and making shocking discoveries about their apparently conventional Irish mothers—make her novels an important addition to contemporary Irish literature. What does it mean to be a professional woman in the United Kingdom with an Irish background? How do such women negotiate their way between past and present, Ireland and England? How do these women perceive, and learn to re-perceive, their relationships with their mothers? Gemma O’Connor’s psychological crime novels address these important questions, and it is her skill with the crime genre that enables her success in social commentary on women’s roles. The crime genre also allows O’Connor to address very basic questions of identity. The surprises and revelations permitted by the plot of a psychologically oriented crime novel create situations that undermine the characters’ identities in unusual ways; these revelations always force a reexamination of self and life, and often allow for renegotiation. The historical aspects of O’Connor’s fiction also enable examination of identity; in her novels, questions of identity are always tied to history and to place. In Time to Remember, Juliet Furbo chastises herself for isolating herself from her past: “She asked herself harshly how on earth someone reasonably intelligent like her could have separated, so mindlessly, the processes of thought and remembrance; the personal from the general. L. P. Hartley got it in half a pithy sentence. The past is a foreign country.” (238, emphasis in the original). O’Connor’s novels are deliberate, yet playful, efforts to reunite those processes on a larger scale, to make manifest the connections between women’s pasts, presents, and futures.


CONCLUSION

y introduction began with Hermione Lee’s evocative formulation of vertical and horizontal reading. I do not want to recapitulate the chapters of my book, but now that I have developed readings of authors whose chosen settings range from twelfth-century France to late twentiethcentury Ireland, I feel obliged to make a few disclaimers. My focus in this book has been on feminist intersections of vertical and horizontal reading; I have been looking at writers who have put their serious research to use in a popular form, and within that group I have been concentrating on those who provide feminist exhortations to agency. As someone who has enjoyed mysteries since I could first read, however, I must say that when, in chapter 2, I point out some of the limitations in Candace Robb and Margaret Frazer’s mystery series, these are limitations only within the context of my present study: I have spent many happy hours immersed in their novels. There are many reasons for reading mysteries; these feminist historical crime novels are ambitious, successful, and fun, but I do not intend to denigrate other forms or reasons for reading. One reason I believe these books serve an educational function is because they provide such pleasurable reading on a foundation of solid research: when I loaned my copy of Seneca Falls Inheritance to my mother, it was eventually returned to me battered from many readers. When readers like something enough to pass it on to their friends, the potential to inspire agency is magnified many times over. Through their emphasis on active reading, manifested in powerful narrative strategies, these writers provide opportunities for further research by readers and an incentive for engaged agency. To some extent, the state of the art I am describing in my book may be a 1990s phenomenon. Several of these writers have branched out into nonfeminist areas, turned to other genres, or taken a break from writing altogether. Jo Ellyn Clarey, one of the leading scholars of women’s history–mystery, believes in a “generational” model of the subgenre, and the writers I focus on in this study may well belong to one particular generation. Perhaps new strategies and sites of engagement are needed for

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the twenty-first century, but these writers have provided invaluable opportunities for general readers to engage with cutting-edge historical research and feminist thinking. I do know that writing about living authors has been daunting; I appreciate the patience of these writers, and I am truly grateful for the encouragement of Gemma O’Connor, Miriam Grace Monfredo, and the Kalamazoo medieval group. I do not pretend to speak for them, however; I am making a case based on their novels, and they may well disagree with my interpretations. One of the fundamental aims of my study has been to build on Robyn Warhol’s recognition of the ability of literary texts to “make something happen” (Gendered Interventions 197) and Cora Kaplan’s formulation of practical politics. I agree wholeheartedly with Kaplan’s idea that literary study should foster agency; it should be “taught in relation to a dynamic of what you might do or produce or be in some future conjuncture” (“Feminist Criticism Twenty Years On” 21, emphasis in the original). As I argued explicitly in my preface—and implicitly throughout this study—feminist historical crime fiction is about the past, the present, and the future.

NOTES

Chapter 1 Contemporary Women’s Historical Crime Fiction 1. There has been a great deal of valuable work on agency. One “case” that illustrates some of the key issues involved in defining agency is the disagreement between Joan W. Scott and Linda Gordon: see their book reviews and responses in Signs, where Scott characterizes agency as “a discursive effect” to which Gordon objects “that construing agency as ‘effect’ drains that notion of any meaning” (851, 853). Several feminist scholars have considered the Scott-Gordon controversy as indicative of “a clash of paradigms within women’s historiography” (Benhabib 229); useful discussions of the controversy can be found in Benhabib’s Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics and Judith Kegan Gardiner’s introduction to Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice. 2. In Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self, Lois McNay argues that “the emphasis that Foucault places on the effects of power upon the body results in a reduction of social agents to passive bodies and does not explain how individuals may act in an autonomous fashion. This lack of a rounded theory of subjectivity or agency conflicts with a fundamental aim of the feminist project: to rediscover and re-evaluate the experiences of women” (3). As postmodern theorist Linda Hutcheon notes, feminism and postmodernism part company over the issue of belief in (feminism), or incredulity toward (postmodernism), their own “metanarratives” (see “Incredulity toward Metanarrative: Negotiating Postmodernism and Feminisms,” 262–67 in Mezei). Such belief in one’s “metanarrative” is a prerequisite for inspiring agency. From a slightly different angle, Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction argues for the importance of feminist criticism’s claims to judgment; he has chosen feminist criticism to be his “representative ethical criticism.” “The feminist challenge,” he writes, “is presented directly to everyone who deals with any literature of any period or culture” (387). In a footnote, he offers his opinion that “the feminists constitute

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3.

4.

5.

6.

NOTES

the most original and important movement on the current scene, even more transformative than the deconstructionists” (388). Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger (1987); A. S. Byatt, Possession (1990); Pat Barker, The Ghost Road (1995); Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997); and Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (2000). Because scholars tend to focus their attention on one subgenre, readers often find errors of basic fact in general crime fiction studies; I will give one example here. While Linda Mizejewski’s primary focus in Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture is on film and television crime dramas, she provides an error-ridden “brief history” of the literary field in the first chapter. She identifies Christie, Sayers, Marsh, and Allingham as part of “the so-called golden age of the detective genre,” then identifies that as “roughly the period up until World War I” (emphasis added) and confirms the error by claiming as a post-golden age development that “the detective story was Americanized and masculinized in the same breath, with the innovation of the rough-edged crime story in the pulp magazine Black Mask in the early 1920s” (17). Checking publication dates for Christie et al., would have pointed out the error, but the larger scheme is also inaccurate. This is just one example of how valuable Knight’s book is, not just for its accuracy in coverage, but more importantly for its depiction of how the American and British crime genre developed and interconnected in ways sometimes at odds with widely held assumptions. Kathy Mezei provides a detailed and useful survey of this body of work in her introduction to Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers. In her introduction to Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel, Robyn Warhol provides a valuable overview of some of the issues faced by those who seek to combine feminism and narrative theory. Not all of the writers studied here describe themselves as feminists. The feminism of the novels studied, however, is evident.

Chapter 2

Medieval Women in Context

1. This is true even in cases where the story is not included within the text. When Newman says “usually, less than ten percent of my research is actually used in the story” (Afterword, Cursed in the Blood), she can be believed. One example of a passing mention that points to an important, fascinating story from that novel is Samson’s comment to Solomon that “ ‘there’s been talk of starting a [Jewish] community at York’ “ (261). Nothing about the remark suggests that it provides a starting point for further research, or even that it is historically accurate, yet the record shows that there was a Jewish community in place in York within thirty years of Samson’s remark—and that the community was subsequently massacred in 1190. 2. Later than the medieval, the early modern series tend to focus on major figures like Queen Elizabeth. It is unfortunate that the two popular series set in Elizabethan England and featuring women sleuths failed to meet most of the

NOTES

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standards for inclusion in this study. Fiona Buckley’s Ursula Blanchard series and Kathy Lynn Emerson’s Lady Susanna Appleton series place their sleuths into a direct relationship with Queen Elizabeth; Buckley even makes Ursula and Elizabeth half-sisters. Similarly, in The Nun’s Tale, the only character who is not shocked that someone has beaten the runaway nun, Joanna, is the reprehensible Richard de Ravenser. Even his perspective on the matter is relatively muted, as he argues that “ ‘no man enjoys beating a woman. So the question is what Dame Joanna did to spur a man to such violence’ ” (133). Histories of the period make clear how commonplace beatings were: of children by parents, of wives by husbands, even of students by teachers (see M. T. Clanchy). In Newman’s Death Comes as Epiphany, when Catherine is to be sent home in supposed disgrace, the abbess asks matter-of-factly whether Catherine’s parents will beat her (14). Finally, one must acknowledge that contemporary feminists have argued how unfairly the issue is still treated by the media, the legal system, and large segments of our own society. These comparisons serve as reminders of the series’ origins in a Creative Anachronism character, and undermine the power of the books to encourage change for women by fostering fatalism. The author’s note in The Squire’s Tale says, in relation to caesarean delivery, that “one has to ask, when someone talks about the ‘barbarous’ Middle Ages, what we should term such willful and unnecessary mutilation of a body today” (277). While obstetrical practice remains an issue for women, this kind of casual comparison is not helpful. Are we more barbarous than before in our handling of childbirth? Equally so? The comparison is particularly ironic given the medieval context for the vertical cut: cutting open a dead woman in order “to find and deliver the baby in time for baptism before it, usually, died” (276). One could certainly argue that it was only superstition that necessitated the cutting open of the woman’s body in the first place, unlike the twenty-first-century justification, ensuring a safe transition into life. Author’s web sites are fascinating in their variety; clearly the primary goal is going to be self-promotion, and most of the writers mentioned in this book have professionally designed and maintained sites. For some writers, however, self-promotion seems to be the only purpose of their web site while others are serving educational purposes as well. Whether this latter approach is a sign of commitment to the historical period, or a savvy marketing strategy, is open to debate, but I appreciate those sites that do more than list appearances, publication record, and glowing reviews. “There will not be a quiz” is from Strong as Death (384). Other formulations she uses include “this is not a classroom; it’s a novel. I would much prefer that my readers just enjoyed the story. That’s why I wrote it” (The Devil’s Door 406) and “because I am also a historian, this book is placed as accurately as possible within my vision of a particular time and place in history. I try very hard to be as accurate as possible. But, as I have said before, I’m not writing a textbook. The main thing is for the reader to enjoy the story” (The Wandering Arm 372).

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7. After listing many examples, Lanser suggests that nineteenth-century women writers used “the epigraph as a means for suggesting the scope of theirknowledge, giving the novel an intellectual and moral weight, and lending external authority to their textual stance” (Fictions of Authority 98). The connections between Lanser’s overview of women’s use of epigraphs and Newman’s practice are clear, as my discussion of the latter demonstrates. 8. The third book of the series, The Wandering Arm, about the theft of relics and other church valuables, offers readers as an epigraph a piece of administrative advice from Suger. “Many of our acquisitions and more of those ornaments of the church that we feared to lose, for example a chalice of gold with an engraved foot and other such things, we ordered to be fastened down” (The Wandering Arm 219). This advice is no doubt necessitated by the love of ostentation he displays in Death Comes as Epiphany. 9. On this issue as well, I find Newman more credible than the other medieval history-mystery writers. Consider, for example, this comment on childbirth in Robb’s The Lady Chapel: Bess Merchet says, “ ‘Just because we can bear children and be as loving as the day is long doesn’t mean we can’t also be strong and vicious’ ” (186). Newman’s vivid presentation of childbirth as exhausting and dangerous rings much truer. 10. Even James/Jacob, in Strong as Death, worries about the virginity of his slaughtered mother and sisters. For years he has obsessed over this issue: “ ‘Our mother, our sisters, were they . . . harmed as well?’ ” (331, original ellipses). Hubert’s ironic response shows his awareness of the strangeness of his brother’s concern: “ ‘apart from being dragged from our home and having their throats slit, they were unmolested’ ” (331). 11. “Her life is both a reflection of the bonds placed upon a woman in her society and the ways in which a strong personality can triumph and succeed in spite of those strictures.” 12. This reference to women, from the chapter entitled “Society and Politics in Medieval France,” is the first in Price’s book. The second appears much later, on p. 216; it is a reference to women munitions workers during World War I! This series of histories is well regarded, aimed at university and educated general audiences, and is recent enough to be aware of the new research on women. It is a depressing commentary on the need for works like Newman’s that such a history largely ignores women’s place in history. 13. Texts by Abelard and Heloise: extracts from Abelard’s letters of direction for the Paraclete, Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum and Sic et Non, the Paraclete breviary, Heloise’s letters to Abelard, and Abelard’s final confession of faith (addressed to Heloise). Sources of texts about them: Robert of Auxerre; Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny. 14. Hersent objects to the story of a princess who changes religion to be with her knight/lover. She argues logically that the story would be more believable if it featured a more ordinary woman: tradesmen’s families would have many opportunities to interact with “infidels,” and relationships might develop (186).

NOTES

Chapter 3

157

Legal Violence in Mid-NineteenthCentury America

1. In discussing the Gospel’s rendering of Pilate’s decision, for example, Girard places Pilate’s wife into just such a functional role: “It seems to me that John introduces the character of the wife in order to make Pilate’s decision less easy and more revealing” (The Scapegoat 106). She herself is irrelevant, not fully real: she simply serves to make a point about her (male) spouse. Her “importance” in Girard’s discussion is as an influence rejected by the real (male) character. 2. “The distinctive trait here is the ‘reciprocity’ and thus, by implication, the equality of the two terms of the violent exchange, the ‘subject’ and the ‘object’ engaged in the rivalry; and consequently the masculinity attributed, in this particular case, to the object. For the subject of violence is always, by definition, masculine; ‘man’ is by definition the subject of culture and of any social act” (250). 3. The fourth book, The Iceweaver, features Hannah’s deaf-mute daughter, Jennet, after Hannah’s death. It was marketed as a novel, not as a mystery, although it continues the themes and plots characteristic of the earlier Hannah books. 4. “She thought he understood that marriage would not be discussed, that that was a tacit agreement between them. Her decision not to marry had been made years ago—a choice that involved a great deal of pain, and long before she met Cullen—when she decided to go to college. Yet here was the painful decision to be made again. A decision forced on her. . . . [B]ecause she was a woman, she had to make the choice. How many times had she heard Susan Anthony say that?” (North Star Conspiracy 32). Even as Glynis’s thoughts are presented to the reader, Monfredo corroborates them though reference to the historical record of Susan B. Anthony’s words on the subject. 5. The titles are, in publication order, “Prologue: How He Killed Her,” “Prologue: How She Made God Weep,” and “Prologue: How He Killed the Ghost of Shame.” 6. Those readers who can see the importance of these “trifles” add to their pleasure as mystery readers, not just as feminists; for as Coward and Semple note, “one of the pleasures of the unfolding narrative is whether the reader will be able to solve the mystery before the detective. Yet the pleasure is a delicate one. Solving the crime too early is unpleasurable; real satisfaction comes from the work of trying to foresee the end but not quite having done so” (50). 7. Valuable resources include Mary Cable’s 1981 novel based on the case, David Kasserman’s scholarly study of it (1986), but especially Catharine Williams’s 1833 Fall River: An Authentic Narrative. Williams’s book is a compelling counterpoint to Monfredo’s Seneca Falls Inheritance. In its depiction of Cornell’s murder, and the trial that let a clearly guilty man go free, Williams’s narrative goes far beyond what a historical crime novelist like Monfredo would dare attempt in an illustration of mid-nineteenth-century American injustice, hypocrisy, and abuse of women.

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8. Like most of her novels, this one includes information on a couple of technological innovations—and their social implications. In Through a Gold Eagle, readers learn about Remington’s new “double-action mechanism” for firearms and about Singer’s sewing machines. The latter provides opportunities for a glimpse at the inequities governing male and female professional sewing. 9. This is true as well of The Stalking Horse, which takes up a real historical mystery in an assassination attempt planned for Abraham Lincoln en route to his inauguration. When the historical event itself is the primary focus, the feminist critique becomes muted, in contrast to a novel like Seneca Falls Inheritance where the historical event is in the background rather than the primary arena.

Chapter 4

(Re)Presenting Sherlock Holmes

1. In fact, the editors of the nine-volume Oxford Sherlock Holmes refer to these experts as “ ‘Sherlockians’—those readers who profess to regard the stories as narratives of fact by a real Dr Watson” (W. W. Robson, “Introduction” to the Oxford The Hound of the Baskervilles). The reader’s attitude toward Holmes further complicates the picture. While there is a presupposition that King’s readers who know the Conan Doyle stories are “fans” of Holmes, this is not necessarily true. There may be readers completely indifferent to Holmes, and even those who only find Holmes palatable in this reconceived form. This important issue goes beyond the bounds of my study, however. 2. Todorov’s word is le vraisemblable. 3. The principal definition in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is “the fact or quality of being verisimilar; the appearance of being true or real; likeness or resemblance to truth, reality, or fact; probability.” The earliest example cited is from 1603, and the OED notes that the word was “in very frequent use from c 1850.” A subdefinition, 1B, is given to note the word’s connection with narratives: “esp. Of statements, narrative, etc.” 4. In the fifth book, O Jerusalem, her preface is entitled “Editor’s Remarks” rather than “Editor’s Preface.” In two of the books, The Moor and Justice Hall, she also includes (in addition to the preface) an “Editor’s Postscript” and an “Editor’s Afterword.” Mary Russell provides an “Author’s Note” at the beginning of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, a “Postscript” to Monstrous Regiment and A Letter of Mary, an “Author’s Prologue” to O Jerusalem, and an epilogue to Justice Hall. 5. There is obviously a parallel between the racial Other and the historical Other; King’s characterization here matches nicely with Duncker’s characterization of the “ ‘God wottery, thou saucy knave’ style of writing, that is, the Jolly Heritage version of history” (38). 6. The name of this organization is not consistent, beginning with “Friends” in the first novel, becoming “Advocates” in the second, switching back to

NOTES

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8.

9.

10.

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“Friends” and then returning again to “Advocates.” Although these may be deliberate moves on Douglas’s part, it would be hard to identify the purpose. Fiona Witherspoon, Ph.D., F.I.A. (alternatively, A.I.A) is clearly a send up of academic sententiousness. In her first outing, she writes about how the Conan Doyle stories have become sacred cows, adding that “to such enthusiasts, any objective re-evaluation of such sanctified bovine conventions raises a red flag” (Good Night 403). Douglas captures the pompous language and the way in which academics love to claim they are offending someone—in this case, the Holmes enthusiasts. In chapter 15, “A Retrospection,” Watson simply mentions that since the end of their Dartmoor adventures, Holmes “had been engaged in two affairs of the utmost importance.” “In the second,” readers are told, “he had defended the unfortunate Mme Montpensier from the charge of murder, which hung over her in connection with the death of her step-daughter, Mlle Carère, the young lady who, as it will be remembered, was found six months later alive and married in New York” (158). Which, as Fiona Witherspoon tartly remarks, is presumably “better than being found dead and married” (Good Morning 372). Witherspoon addresses the provenance of the story directly in her Afterword, explaining inconsistencies between the two versions of the story. Adding to the chance nature of the original source of the story—a reference deliberately designed to sound perplexing— is the fact that these two cases Watson mentions were not in the original versions, but “were added in the first English and American book texts” (Oxford Hound 188). The epigraph is identified only by name and life dates (as are all the other chapter epigraphs in this novel, except for the biblical ones), but it is, of course, from The Taming of the Shrew, a suggestive textual context. “It [the letter] will not be released until a minimum of ten years after my death: I gave that promise to Col. Dennis Edwards to atone for my actions against him” (314). Her decision is foreshadowed earlier in the novel when, during her conversation with Lestrade, she talks about the enormous repercussions that would follow publication of the letter and how waiting another fifty years seems insignificant after the nineteen hundred years the papyrus has already survived unknown (87–88). Irene Adler Norton comments rather smugly to Nell Huxleigh that “ ‘[o]rdinary, middle-class marriage can be enthralling with an exceptional man’ ” (Good Morning, Irene 12), but her meaning, as is often the case in the Douglas series, is sexual.

Chapter 5

Suffragette Disruptions: History, Chronology, Closure

1. Ironically, the back cover copy of Virago’s Dead Man Riding calls Nell a “celebrated sleuthess.” The Virago paperback reprint of Dance on Blood

160

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4.

5.

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blurbs on its cover The Times (London) reviewer’s phrase, “suffragette sleuthess.” Linscott’s most recent title, Blood on the Wood, is set in 1906 and Nell herself refers to the Daily Mail’s naming of the WSPU militants (5). In Absent Friends, Linscott writes that there were seventeen women who stood as candidates in the first general election in which (some) women could vote. This figure conflicts with Holton, who writes that “eighteen women candidates came forward” for that election (229). Linscott’s figure is corroborated by a House of Commons fact sheet (www.parliament.uk/ commons/lib/fs05.pdf) and the Fawcett society (www.fawcettsociety. org.uk/pdfs), demonstrating once again the care of Linscott’s research and the accuracy of the information she presents to her readers. This too has its Shavian antecedent, when the exotic crashes into the complacent in Misalliance (1910). Furthermore, the passenger who saves the foolish pilot is initially assumed to be male; when the goggles come off, the passenger “stands revealed as a remarkably good-looking woman”; after a flurry of exclamations over this fact, there is “an embarrassed pause.” It is an interesting footnote to the passage of women’s suffrage that the first woman elected to Parliament did not take her seat: the only woman elected in the 1918 election was Con Markievicz (Constance Gore-Booth), but as a member of the Sinn Fein party she refused to sit in Westminster, serving instead in the first Dail in Dublin. The election results were perhaps affected by the fact that the1918 law allowed adult women (over twenty-one) to stand for election, but only women over thirty received the right to vote. Not until 1928 were all women given the vote. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, in The Long Weekend, explain the politics behind this division: “It was expected that these elder women, uninfected with the revolutionary mood that possessed the younger ones—who had done the hardest and most thankless war-work—would be an asset to the ‘the party of law and order’ with which the Coalition now identified themselves. It was also calculated that few women in the early thirties would care to register as voters, for fear of revealing their age” (10). They also note that “this granting of the vote to the elder women created far less excitement than the subsequent enfranchisement of women of twenty-one—the so-called Flapper’s Vote—which was held by most Conservatives to be a gratuitous present to the forces of revolution” (11).

Chapter 6

Women and the Ever-Present Past

1. For any Irish writer, Following the Wake must have a Joycean resonance, although it clearly links O’Connor’s sixth book to its predecessor, whose story it picks up years later. O’Connor has written a play about Nora Joyce, so the Joycean echo has an added interest. 2. Another way to chart this is through her publications. I realize that authors may not have complete control over these elements, but the process matches

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McCrumb’s own public statements about her writing. The dust jacket of She Walks These Hills (1994) describes it as “a novel of suspense” and identifies McCrumb as an “Edgar Award Winner.” The biographical note includes both mystery and nonmystery awards. This novel went on to win Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity awards for best novel. By The Ballad of Frankie Silver (1998), the dust jacket description has shifted to “a novel” and McCrumb is a “New York Times Bestselling Author.” (This is also the title of her web site, http://www.sharynmccrumb.com: “Sharyn McCrumb, New York Times Bestselling Author.”) The biographical note, however, retains the mystery awards. Three years later, in The Songcatcher (2001), these awards have been expunged from the biographical note, omissions continued in Ghost Riders (2003). In Ghost Riders, she puts the quilt image in Malinda Blalock’s mind as a metaphor for the civil war: “Being a woman, I thought of the war as a big old quilt, patterned with a stitch for every man killed, for every one wounded, for every farm burned, every child orphaned” (245). A very literal quilt is used for protection against the ghost soldiers in that novel, as well, when Rattler, McCullough, and Nora Bonesteel sit on the quilt for the power of its “old magic” conveyed through the patterns whose origins have been forgotten (313–18). For example, in her 1998 Recorded Books interview for The Ballad of Frankie Silver, McCrumb talks about how urban areas are judged by their wealthiest inhabitants whereas rural areas are judged by their poorest. This idea, in nearly identical words, is expressed by Martha Ayers in She Walks These Hills (77–78). See footnote seven for another example. In The Ballad of Frankie Silver, one of the trail hikers LeDonne interviews is tagged with this label (206). The exaggeration of his portrait is clear—even someone who felt confident about calling the locals “rednecks” would hardly be likely to use that term when speaking on the phone to the local sheriff! He describes someone who looked out of place on the trail. When, later in the novel, the person he describes turns out to be the killer, he does not get much credit for helping them as LeDonne laconically notes, “ ‘Guy with an earring. One of the other hikers noticed him’ ” (344). An ironic note is provided by the 1944 booklet reprinting of newspaper articles relating to the case, Official Court Record of the Trial, Conviction and Execution of Francis Silvers, First Woman Hanged in North Carolina; not only does this very official-sounding title use the plural form, Silvers, but it also substitutes the masculine Francis for the correct, feminine form, Frances. When you are dealing with that kind of condescending bigot, you take your text from the book of Matthew. Chapter twenty-five, verse thirty-five. Yes, you do that. He paid me for the deer then, and I thanked him and headed home. That night before I went to bed I looked up the verse he commended to me for dealing with summer people who think we are savages and pay to hear lies. Verse 35: “I was a stranger, and you took me in.”

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9.

10.

11. 12.

The next summer I made steady pocket money telling flatlanders all about the dragon up on Celo Mountain (268, emphasis in the original). This image is quite similar to the mass market paperback edition of Thom’s Follow the River, which features a voluptuous, scantily clad Mary Ingles and war-painted Shawnee against a mountainous river valley. And of course Frankie Silver did kill her husband, while Fate Harkryder’s brothers were guilty of the murders of Emily Stanton and Mike Wilson. Both end up being executed, but Harkryder has to be innocent of the crime in order to receive the same kind of sympathy McCrumb can evoke for Frankie Silver, who was not allowed to testify on her own behalf or present her claim of self-defense. An added irony is the source of Jeddie’s knowledge. The past’s ability to disrupt the present is seen here, too, as the documents she receives that send her to Holy Retreat with this knowledge come from her grandmother, sent according to her instructions via her solicitors a full fifteen years after the grandmother’s death. “ ‘It was not so very unusual in the nineteenth century,’ Mike Flood interjected sotto voce. None of them paid much attention” (348). Unlike the Mother Guardian, neither Tess Callaway, the librarian Sister Mary-Rose, nor Sister Benedicte are taken in by Jeddie’s claim; they recognize that her true goal is access within the enclosure to the library with its hidden treasures (Farewell to the Flesh 314–16, 430–31).

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INDEX

Abelard, Peter, 22, 23, 28, 33, 38, 40–4, 45, 156 n. 13, see also Heloise Agency, female, 1–3, 18–20, 39, 58, 64, 67, 75–7, 81–2, 104–5, 108, 109–11, 112–13, 121, 151, 153 n. 1, 153 n. 2 Anthony, Susan B., 67, 71, 157 n. 4 Arbitration, see courts Barker, Pat, Regeneration, 6, 114–15 Ben-Zvi, Linda, 15 Bernard of Clairvaux, 32–3 Bertens, Hans, 6, 11–12, 59, 60, 63, 129, 131–2, 133 Brooks, Peter, 9, 17 Brown, John, 68–9 Byatt, A. S., 5, 6, 143 Cady Stanton, Elizabeth, 16, 67, 71, 72, 73, 76 Carnes, Mark C., 5 Carr, Helen, 86 Clanchy, M. T., 41–3 Clarey, Jo Ellyn, 151 Courts, judicial, 26, 49–52, 60–1, 77–82, 117, 120, 138–9 Coward, Rosalind, 8–9, 157 n. 6 Davis, Natalie Zemon, Fiction in the Archives, 13–14, 17, 52, 65 Women on the Margins, 21–2 D’haen, Theo, see Bertens, Hans

Douglas, Carole Nelson, Castle Rouge, 91, 92–3 Chapel Noir, 93 Irene At Large, 89–90, 91 Good Morning, Irene, 93 Good Night, Mr. Holmes, 83–4, 89, 92, 95, 96 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 9–10, 83–5, 87, 90–7, 100, 105, 107–8 “A Case of Identity,” 94 The Hound of the Baskervilles, 158 n. 1, 159 n.8 “A Scandal in Bohemia,” 95–6 Dronke, Peter, 41–2 Duncker, Patricia, 6, 116, 131, 138, 158 n. 5 Eco, Umberto, The Name of the Rose, 12, 22 Epigraphs, use of, 2, 29–36, 68, 70, 71, 99, 128, 140–3 Feminism, ix–x, xvi, 1–11, 22–3, 53–5, 65–6, 83–5, 92–6, 119–20, 148–9, 151–2 defined, 1–3 see also agency Fludernik, Monika, 6 Frames, narrative, use of, xv, 84, 88–93, 127, 131, 139–40, 158 n. 4 Frazer, Margaret, 35, 57, 151, 152 The Maiden’s Tale, 26 The Novice’s Tale, 24, 26

172

INDEX

Frazer, Margaret—continued A Play of Isaac, 26 The Prioress’ Tale, 26 The Reeve’s Tale, 26 The Squire’s Tale, 21, 24, 26–8, 155 n. 4 The Widow’s Tale, 24 Genette, Gérard, 18, 29–31 Girard, René, 12, 60–1, 68, 73, 74–8, 82 Glaspell, Susan, Trifles, 14–17, 65, 66 Hartman, Mary S., 12–14 Heilbrun, Carolyn, xiii, 8, 84, 99, 100, 105 Heloise, 22, 23, 32, 38, 40–4, 156 n. 13 Historical figures, 39, 68–9, see under individual names Hoberman, Ruth, xiv, 4–5 Holton, Sandra Stanley, 110, 111–12, 160 n. 3 Kaplan, Cora, 2, 113, 152 King, Laurie R., 87, 93, 97 The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, 83, 84, 87, 88–9, 97, 100 The Game, 91, 101 “Mrs Hudson’s Case,” 104–5 O Jerusalem, 89, 90, 97 Justice Hall, 98, 100–1 A Letter of Mary, 88, 89, 96, 97, 101, 102–4, 106–7 A Monstrous Regiment of Women, 89, 91, 97, 98–9, 101–4, 106 The Moor, 89, 97 Klein, Kathleen Gregory, 7, 8, 18, 112–13 Knight, Stephen, 6–7, 10, 15, 129, 154 n. 4 Lanser, Susan Sniader, 17–18, 19–20, 29, 79–80, 85, 131–2, 156 n. 7 Lawrence, Margaret, 61, 63–4 Lee, Hermione, 1, 151

Legislation, 27–8, 60–1, 64, 69–73, 74, 76, 113–14 Linscott, Gillian, 4, 18, 109, 111 Absent Friends, 111, 116–17, 121–2, 123–4, 160 n. 3 Crown Witness, 117 Dance on Blood, 109, 118 Dead Man’s Music, 113, 118, 123 Dead Man Riding, 118–20 Hanging on the Wire, 111, 112, 114–16 A Healthy Body, 124 Murder, I Presume, 124–5 The Perfect Daughter, 122 Sister Beneath the Sheet, 119, 122–3 Stage Fright, 110, 113–14 Unknown Hand, 124–5 A Whiff of Sulfur, 124 Widow’s Peak, 119 Makinen, Merja, 8 Marriage and partnership, 38, 62, 105–8, 113–14, 120–2, 147–8, 157 n. 4 McCrumb, Sharyn, 127–8, 131–2, 148–9 The Ballad of Frankie Silver, 132, 133–4, 135, 138–9 Ghost Riders, 129, 130–1, 134 She Walks These Hills, 129–30, 131, 135, 136–7 The Songcatcher, 128, 132–3, 135, 136 McMillan, Ann, 61, 62–3 Merivale, Patricia, 7–8 Mezei, Kathy, 154 n. 5 Mizejewski, Linda, 7, 9, 154 n. 4 Monfredo, Miriam Grace, 4, 5, 35, 152 North Star Conspiracy, 71, 73, 78–9 Seneca Falls Inheritance, 62–6, 67–8, 72–8, 80–2, 106 Sisters of Cain, 69 The Stalking Horse, 158 n. 9 Through a Gold Eagle, 10–11, 68–9, 70 Munt, Sally R., 7

INDEX

Narrative theory, 17–20, 117–19, 144–5, 151–2 see also epigraphs and frames see under Brooks, Fludernik, Genette, Lanser, Rabinowitz, Warhol Newman, Sharan, 4, 18, 152 Cursed in the Blood, 30–2, 34, 35, 36, 38 Death Comes as Epiphany, 28, 29, 32–3, 34–5, 44, 155 n. 3 The Devil’s Door, 28, 29, 38, 44, 48 The Difficult Saint, 21 Heresy, 28, 36, 37, 39, 43–4 Strong as Death, 35–6, 38, 44, 45–55 The Wandering Arm, 33–4, 36, 37, 55 To Wear the White Cloak, 37 Noble, David F., 40 O’Connor, Gemma, 127–8, 138–9, 148–9, 152 Falls the Shadow, 127, 128, 147 Farewell to the Flesh, 128, 140–6, 147, 148 Following the Wake, 128 Sins of Omission, 128, 139–41, 146–7 Time to Remember, 129, 146, 149 Walking on Water, 129 Ozieblo, Barbara, 15–16 Partnership, see marriage Perry, Anne, 3, 6, 69

173

Peters, Elizabeth, 3 Peters, Ellis, 3, 12, 21 Rabinowitz, Peter J., 18, 23, 30 Radway, Janice A., 11 Religion, women and, 49, 52–3, 97, 101–3, 145–6 Reproduction and sexuality, 34–6, 53–5, 62, 73–4 Robb, Candace, 21, 23, 24–6, 35, 56–7, 151, 152, 155 n. 3 Semple, Linda, see Coward, Rosalind Shephard, Ben, 6, 114–15 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, see under Cady Stanton, Elizabeth Suffrage, women’s, 4, 67, 98, 109–12, 117–20, 121–2, 124, 160 n. 3, 160 n. 5 Sybil of Anjou, 39, 44 Todorov, Tzvetan, 18, 83, 85–6 Walton, Priscilla L., 7 Warhol, Robyn, 3, 18, 152, 154 n. 5 Wellman, Judith, 72 Wheeler, Bonnie, 40–1 Williams, Catharine, Fall River: An Authentic Narrative, 66–7 Woolf, Virgina, ix, 1, 3, 99, 119 York, Archbishop of, 23–4, 25, 56–7

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