Feminism in Women's Detective Fiction

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

There was a time when a woman detective was a contradiction in terms.
Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Dorothy Sayers’s Harriet Vane were
rare birds until relatively recently. The essays collected here by
Glenwood Irons show just how radically the image has changed.

Twelve essays address such intriguing topics as “The Detective
Heroine and the Death of Her Hero: Dorothy Sayers and P.D. James”;
“Questing Women: The Feminist Mystery After Feminism”; “Nancy
Drew, the Once and Future Prom Queen”; “Feminist Murder: Amanda
Cross Reinvents Womanhood” (Amanda Cross is the invention of American
scholar Carolyn Heilbrun); and “Habeas Corpus: Feminism and Detective
Fiction.”

Irons’s 15-page introduction on the woman detective traces the
late–20th-century development of the genre by showing its portrayal of
female power and of the woman as hero. The essays, and the
gender-altered version of the genre they examine, are simultaneously
provocative and substantial.