Exhibition: "The Victorian World in Flux."

On display until December 22nd is the exhibition "Detecting an Anxious Gaze: The Victorian World in Flux" in McLennan Library's Rare Books and Special Collections at McGill University. The exhibition is curated by graduate students in the course Enter the Detective. Mystery items include Revelations of a Lady Detective (1884) by William Stephens Hayward.

More on the exhibition here.

Return of Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864).

Just out in paperback from University of Chicago Press is the British Library's reissue of Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864, attrib. William Stephens Hayward). This is an important early work featuring a female detective. This edition is only for sale in North and South America; UK residents can buy it from the British Library here.

The first female detective in literature?

In today's Washington Post, Dennis Drabelle quotes from John Sutherland's Curiosities of Literature, stating that "the first female detective in literature was probably Amelia Butterworth, who made her debut in Anna Katharine Green's That Affair Next Door (1897)."

The assertion is inaccurate. Miss G. (aka Miss Gladden) in The Female Detective (1864) by Andrew J. Forrester Jr. is commonly identified as the first female detective in fiction. Also predating Butterworth are Mrs. Paschal in the anonymous The Experiences of a Lady Detective (1864, following Forrester by six months; attrib. to William Stephens Hayward, but there is controversy about this attribution), Catherine Louisa Pirkis's Loveday Brooke (1893, stories collected in The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective), and Emma Van Deventer's Madeline Payne (Madeline Payne, Detective's Daughter, 1884; and Moina, 1891). One could also argue that Wilkie Collins's Marian Halcombe acts as a detective in The Woman in White (1860), as well as Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Eleanor Vane in Eleanor's Victory (1863).

Update. The Female Detective is available in an audiobook version from Blackstone.