LIT 3383 – Spring 2027 – Bliss

This course seeks to find an illusive figure in literature: the female detective. Who was she? How old was she? How did she get into detective work? Oftentimes when scholars look at the genre of detective fiction, they see the male writers and their masculine heroes trooping across a foggy London or English manor house. However, women were writing detective fiction for just as long, and the so-called "lady detectives" they wrote did just as much work to play with and expand the genre of crime fiction. This semester, we'll trace the path of women detectives from the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth, and think about how these fictional sleuths and the women who wrote them used the genre to balance tenuously between the social expectations of their time period and writing a new, active kind of feminine hero. Along the way, we'll see how the female detective took many forms, from the femme fatale who disarms male suspects with her beauty, to the practical career woman who lives for her job, to the shrewd old woman who sees more than she lets on. These case studies from Susan Hopley, to Loveday Brooke, to Miss Marple will help us use detective stories to think about women's agency and narrative across a range of historical periods.
This course meets the requirements for Exploring the Human Experience and fulfills the State-Mandated Writing (W) credit.