Research

The female detective is one of the most remarkable yet underexplored figures in nineteenth-century popular fiction. From the earliest casebook narratives of the 1860s — W.S. Hayward’s The Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864) and Andrew Forrester Jr’s (James Redding Ware) The Female Detective (1864) — to the turn-of-the-century New Woman sleuths of Grant Allen and the Bengali guptakatha tradition, the female detective appeared in diverse literary cultures shaped by overlapping yet distinct social forces.

In Britain, women had been part of policing since its modern inception in the 1830s. The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 created demand for private inquiry agents, and women were increasingly employed in this capacity, as Sara Lodge has demonstrated. Fictional female detectives such as those in Grant Allen’s Miss Cayley’s Adventures and Hilda Wade drew on and reimagined this reality, casting their heroines as autonomous professionals who traversed the nation by railway and steamer.

In colonial India, female detectives emerged from a different social matrix. The introduction of colonial policing from 1858–59 saw women recruited to surveil “low classes of women” and investigate cases of abortion and infanticide. Bengali popular fiction of the late nineteenth century developed its own tradition of female detective narratives, including Kshetramohan Ghosh’s Pratapchand (featuring the detective Bama and the formidable villainess Bijoli Bala), the contested Bankaullar Daptar (The Case Files of Inspector Bankaullah), and Dinendrakumar Ray’s Hatya Rahasya (The Murder Mystery), which portrays Kusum, a “nobeena” or New Woman detective who travels hundreds of kilometres from Calcutta to Benares to solve a murder. Shampa Roy’s translations of Bengali detective casebooks have been instrumental in making this material available to English-language readers.

In Australia, the Victorian gold rushes of the 1850s catalysed rapid urbanisation and a proliferation of crime, creating both the need for women in policing roles and a market for popular fiction. Lucy Sussex’s pioneering recovery work on Mary Fortune, one of the earliest female crime fiction writers, has been central to understanding this tradition. Nell Darby’s historical research on real-life female detectives has likewise shaped the field.

By reading across these three traditions, this research reveals how the female detective subgenre was not a purely metropolitan British invention but a transnational phenomenon that emerged simultaneously in response to the shared dislocations and opportunities of imperial modernity.

Mobility is at the heart of the female detective texts studied in this project — both as a plot device that propels the detective’s narrative and as a meta-textual force that shaped how these stories were written, distributed, and consumed. The mid-nineteenth century saw the laying of millions of kilometres of railway track, the expansion of transatlantic and transoceanic shipping lines, and the revolution of urban transport through omnibuses and trams. These technologies transformed not merely the physical landscape but perception itself.

Drawing on the work of Ana Parejo Vadillo on vehicular vision and female mobility, and Ben Moore on the “invisible architecture” of railway landscapes, this research examines how the experience of high-speed rail travel created new forms of observation — the passenger becoming an observer, the panoramic view from the carriage window reshaping how the world was apprehended and represented in fiction. The female detective, whose work required her to move freely through public spaces, was both a product and a figure of this new mobility.

The age of steam also revolutionised print culture. Railway reading demanded quick, consumable fiction — and sensation and crime narratives filled this market. WHSmith established bookstalls at railway stations across Britain, and comparable distribution networks emerged across the colonies. The serialisation of detective fiction in periodicals created transnational readerships: Bengali journals such as Bharati (edited by women of the Tagore family) published crime fiction alongside scientific writing and geographical exploration, while authors like Dinendrakumar Ray adapted the Sherlock Holmes canon and Sexton Blake stories into Bengali settings, creating figures like Robert Blake and producing over two hundred serialised narratives.

This mobility of texts — their adaptation, translation, and circulation across linguistic and geographic boundaries — is as central to this project as the physical mobility of the detective characters themselves.

This project contributes to the growing movement to decentre and pluralise Victorian literary studies. Drawing on Priya Joshi’s concept of “vernacular Victorianisms,” and developed in conversation with Caroline Sumpter and Pablo Mukherjee, it challenges the assumption that the Victorian literary field originated exclusively in the metropolis, examining the many centres and traditions of literature that flourished in the nineteenth century across the British Empire.

The Bengali texts at the heart of this research emerged from the vibrant Battala publishing scene of Calcutta, centred around the upper Chitpore Road, where Reverend Long’s 1858 survey counted some forty-seven vernacular presses producing a multilingual sea of Bengali, Persian, and Urdu material — from textbooks and almanacs to sensational guptakathas (secret narratives), woodcuts, calendar art, and popular fiction. These were not merely derivative copies of British models but original literary works that drew upon local narrative traditions, social conditions, and readerships while also engaging with transnational literary currents.

The figure of the female detective in Bengali fiction raises urgent questions about gender, caste, and colonial power. Where British female detectives were often celebrated for their autonomy and independence, their counterparts in colonial Bengal occupied more ambiguous positions — sometimes drawn from lower-caste communities whose mobility was less restricted than that of upper-caste women, sometimes functioning as undercover agents whose detective work was inseparable from the colonial policing apparatus. The beshya (prostitute) detective, the nobeena (New Woman) detective, and the professional police detective each represent a distinct figuration of female agency shaped by the intersection of colonialism, caste, and patriarchy.

By examining these figures alongside their British and Australian counterparts, this research develops a truly comparative and decolonial account of how crime fiction evolved as a global genre in the nineteenth century.

The New Woman was a contested figure in late-Victorian culture on both sides of the colonial divide. In Britain, she represented female education, professional ambition, and bodily freedom — frequently caricatured but also celebrated. In Bengal, the nobeena was similarly polarising: popular caricatures depicted her sitting atop her husband’s shoulders while the husband led his own mother by the neck, or reading while her husband cooked — a sign of the Kali yuga, the dark age in which the natural order was reversed.

Yet the New Woman detective in Bengali fiction could also be a figure of remarkable agency. Kusum, the protagonist of Dinendrakumar Ray’s Hatya Rahasya, is an educated woman in a companionate marriage who declares that she will save her husband from the “sea of disrepute” after he is accused of murder. She travels hundreds of kilometres from Calcutta to Benares and solves the case in a first-person narrative that gives voice to her purpose and determination. The fact that Ray, writing in the early twentieth century, chose a female first-person narrator for a detective story — a form associated with masculine authority and observation — is a remarkable literary choice.

Caste operates as a crucial but often invisible axis of analysis. Many real-life female detectives in colonial India were drawn from lower castes — midwives from leather-working communities, women whose movements were less policed than those of middle- and upper-class women. Their social vulnerability paradoxically gave them a freedom of movement that made them effective agents of surveillance, as Sumanta Banerjee has documented. As Partha Chatterjee has demonstrated, the “new patriarchy” of colonial Bengal sought to co-opt the New Woman figure for nationalist purposes, fusing her image with that of the motherland. The female detective in Bengali fiction navigates these competing claims on her identity, making her a figure of exceptional complexity.