Congratulations on being shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2025. How does it feel to be shortlisted and what would winning mean to you?
It’s an incredible honour. I am grateful, humbled and astonished. The news has made me feel several inches taller.
I think the greatest gift of winning would be the feeling that I was joining a constellation of writers whom I admire so profoundly. Given that non-fiction by women statistically sometimes struggles to be seen (in 2022, only a third of the ‘top 500’ non-fiction titles were by women), I’d also be thrilled that a book about women’s history was being honoured in this way.
What was the inspiration behind The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective?
It was very concrete. In 2012, the British Library reprinted two works of popular fiction from 1864: The Female Detective and Revelations of a Lady Detective. Cheap sensation literature when they first appeared, these racy titles are now very rare and valuable because they are the first works to pose as casebooks written by a female detective. One editor remarked that the sudden eruption of these two books in 1864 was surprising because there were no real female detectives at the time.
Pondering this anomaly, the wilful thought came into my head: ‘I don’t believe you!’ I went home, started searching the small ads of Victorian newspapers, and – to my surprise and delight – found two from the Times in 1875, for private enquiry agencies offering ‘experienced female detectives’. The game was afoot…
A decade of research and writing followed. But I never lost the excitement of that original hunch.
What does the research process look like for you? What were the key milestones along the way?
Aptly enough for someone who writes about detectives, I am a ferret. I often get hold of a lead and just can’t let it go until I have figured out who did what to whom. Pursuing the case involves a mixture of sources: archival documents ranging from court records to letters to melodramas that survive only in a single manuscript; digitised newspapers; genealogical evidence; but also contextual reading of memoirs, contemporary accounts, and more modern analysis.
I love the way that this complex collage of data, over time, begins to reveal clear patterns. Insights emerge from what once seemed an impenetrable warren of characters and stories. You start to know the cast; to have a feel for the territory. You begin to understand the underlying questions, which are often subtly different from the questions you thought you were researching at first.
The two detectives whose stories were hardest for me to trace in this book were Ann Lovsey and ‘Clara Layt’ (whose real name, improbably, turned out to be Clara Jolly Death). When I finally cracked Clara’s identity, through comparing handwriting on two documents, it was a glorious feeling.
Why do you feel it is important to celebrate history writing?
History challenges us: it is a fascinating and vital reminder that things might have been otherwise. It shows that dominant factions and assumptions about the world change. That is why, I think, authoritarian governments tend to want to control the narrative of history. Trying to understand the choices, beliefs, personalities and pressures that were formative in the past, alerts us to the forces that shaped the dynamics of the social world we inhabit. If we don’t look hard at history, we’re like kids who prefer to believe the stork delivered them. We’re not considering the truth of the complex relationships into which we were conceived.
Then again, history is also magical. It’s a ring of standing stones; a coded diary that is a portal to intimacy with people long dead. The patina of the past is beautiful in itself.
The Wolfson Foundation awards grants to a wide variety of museums, historic buildings and landscapes. Do you have a favourite historical place, or a place that inspired you?
I was born and raised in Colinton, a village on the edge of Edinburgh. My grandfather was a church minister and my mum was a single mother when I was born, so I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, who were Edwardians. For this reason, Victoriana never seemed old to me: I grew up around nineteenth-century objects. We owned little that was new.
It was the architecture of Edinburgh, its libraries and museums, that inspired me to study history. I was very lucky to have a sense of history (the Old Town and New Town) instilled in me from childhood through walking in graveyards, looking up at Georgian fanlights, feeling cobbles under my feet. One of my favourite places is St Cecilia’s Hall and Music Museum: an elliptical Georgian concert hall in the Cowgate where musicians regularly play early music on period instruments.
I still love to walk Edinburgh: up Calton Hill, along the Water of Leith, visiting the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, which has a magical carol concert in its atrium in December, where you can look up and see a frieze of Scottish history as a procession or conga of famous figures.
Read an extract from The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective.
Top images: ‘The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective’ book cover; portrait of Sara Lodge, credit Michael Wharley
