SUMMARY
This essay explores Catherine L. Pirkis’ contribution to the male--defined genre of detective fiction. Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1853), and of course Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (1887) are most common in discussions of this genre. By comparison, works written by women that depict a female detective have been overlooked. W. S Hayward’s Revelations of a Lady Detective and Andrew Forrester’s The Female Detective (both published in 1864) were two of the first novels featuring a female detective, despite being written by men. Although these novels are significant in that they were the first to challenge gender roles in this genre, I will focus on The Experiences of Loveday Brooke: Lady Detective by Catherine L. Pirkis, published in the height of the New Woman movement, in 1893. This work is significant not only because Pirkis contributes to the predominantly ‘masculine’ genre of the detective story, but because she does so in a way that is proleptic; she portrays Loveday as a strong, independent woman with a paid profession, years before women detectives officially joined the police force. This article will examine Loveday’s affective labours, and illustrate how her knowledge enables her to solve crimes successfully.