described by Jenny Uglow as “by far the best thing I have ever read on Lear.”
Lodge applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective, and reported the following:
You might get your kicks on page 66. But on page 99, you will find a key line. My book, The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective, is about real-life women in the nineteenth century who worked to solve mysteries, crimes, and to detect malfeasance, whether with the police or as private enquiry agents. But it’s also about the myth of the female detective as it developed on the Victorian stage and page. Page 99 is in the chapter on theatre. It describes the stage appearance of Sara Lane – actor-manager of London’s Britannia theatre– in Colin Henry Hazlewood’s play The Female Detective, in 1865. A key feature of the role was to emphasize Lane’s dramatic powers. The female detective could convince the public that she was anyone at all: male or female, old or young, from anywhere in the world:Learn more about The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective at the Yale University Press website.In a tour de force of quick-change versatility, she metamorphoses into Grizzle Gutteridge (‘a Somersetshire Wench’), Mrs Gammage (an ancient Nurse), Mr Harry Racket (a fast young Man) and Barney O’Brian (an Irish boy ‘from the bogs of Ballyragget’). Such protean dramatic changes required great skill: they were a visible masterclass in acting, where the lead actress showed her many different faces, accents and costumes.Although page 99 only showcases one aspect of my research – the female detective in Victorian theatre – it does pick up a theme that will recur throughout the book. The feisty female detective character responds to male violence and abuse and reflects real concerns about women’s safety and women’s rights in this period. Domestic violence in this play is a key predictor of public felonies. Though Hazlewood’s play is a melodrama, with a sensational plot, this contention is accurate. Women’s ‘natural curiosity’, and decision to ‘act’ in a detective role is depicted as a necessary corrective to male deception.FLORENCE: I hear you’re a widder, mim –– so am I; matrimony’s a serus thing – I declare I never shall forget how I felt when Gammage said, “With my goods I thee endow.” He kept a furniture shop, mim, but when he died I found I was mistaken, and I was left executioner to an intestine estate, with everybody a trying to circumvent the poor widow’s mite, mim. Oh, dear! (cries)Of course, Sara Lane playing Florence playing Mrs Gammage, who can’t tell an executor from an executioner, is not to be taken entirely seriously. Yet the point she makes about women being cheated in marriage recurs throughout the play. Florence Langton constantly berates the male sex, remarking: ‘That’s just like those horrid men. I begin to think it’s high time they were abolished altogether’ and ‘this monstrosity on two legs, called a man’; ‘what men say and what they do are two very different things.’ She sings the song from Much Ado about Nothing. ‘Sigh no more ladies, sigh no more / Men were deceivers ever’– but unlike Shakespeare’s female leads Beatrice and Hero, Florence and Una remain happily single at the play’s end. Women’s legal vulnerability in marriage is a persistent theme.
Throughout its chapters, my book compares the moral ambiguities of women’s real- life investigative cases in the Victorian period and the ways in which Victorians imagined female detectives, often as heroines with aspirational physical and mental powers. There is a gulf—then as now – between our desire for strong women to be able to secure other women’s safety, and the realities of law enforcement. But staging the female detective – whether it is Sara Lane or Kate Winslet playing her – is one way of asserting women’s right to get even, and to be who they choose to be.
--Marshal Zeringue
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