Dead Husbands and Deviant Women: Investigating the Detective Widow in Neo-Victorian Crime Fiction

Abstract

Over the past decade, the detective widow has become a well-established character in the little-explored subgenre of neo-Victorian crime fiction. In Tasha Alexander's Lady Emily series, the author argues, the detective widow investigates the gendered characteristics and com- plexities of Victorian widowhood while detecting the artistic crimes associated with historical fiction's imitations and adaptations of the past. In outlining the scope of the academic journal Neo-Victorian Studies, Marie-Luise Kohlke describes neo-Victorianism as "the contemporary fascination with reimagining the nineteenth century and its varied literary, artistic, socio-political and historical contexts"; this fascination is "perhaps most evident in the proliferation of so-called neo-Victorian novels" ("Aims and Scopes"). Fictional revisitings of the nineteenth century by authors such as A. S. Byatt, Michel Faber, Amitav Ghosh, and Sarah Waters have topped bestseller lists and have begun to form part of a neo-Victorian canon that, since the turn of the new millennium, has begun to receive significant critical attention. 1 Despite this burgeoning aca- demic interest in literary manifestations of the neo-Victorian, however, critics have largely neglected neo-Victorian crime fiction. 2 This essay considers the significance of one partic- ularly striking feature of recent examples in the subgenre: the figure of the detective widow. A dilettante sleuth, this character strives to break, or at least occasionally transgress, the boundaries of respectable femininity, not only through her investigative association with the crimes of others but also through her own deviant (if not criminal) intellectual pur- suits (usually in the form of certain reading and/or writing activities) as well as her partial disregard for mourning customs and other matters of social etiquette. This figure, who usu-