New Woman Fiction, 1881-1899, Part II

‘It’s a big thing’, proclaims private detective Loveday Brooke in the opening line of The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1894). She is speaking of the £30,000 of stolen jewellery that is subject of her first case, but Loveday’s own appearance in print was also, in its way, a ‘big thing’. Not only is she one of the earliest female-authored ‘lady detectives’ in British fiction, but she is also one of the most inherently successful of fictional New Women. Marking the culmination of Catherine Louisa Pirkis’s literary career and being its most enduring creation, Loveday is also a ‘big thing’ in the life of her author.

Little known today, Annie E. Holdsworth was a popular novelist in late nineteenth-century England, though her works would eventually fade into obscurity as the twentieth century progressed. She was born Eliza Ann Holdsworth on 25 April 1860 at Grey’s Hill, Jamaica, the third of five children of a missionary and his wife, the Reverend William and Elizabeth (Hall) Holdsworth. In 1869, the family returned to England, with Rev. Holdsworth serving as Wesleyan minister in Snaith, Yorkshire. By 1881, Annie E. Holdsworth was boarding with a minister’s widow, Mary Hawson, at Wellington Cottage, Sussex, and teaching in a school. She is listed on the 1881 Census as a widow.

What is it exactly that is nobody’s fault? The accident of being born to working parents? The accident of being over-educated? Or, the accident of being born a woman? Janet (always known as Netta) Syrett’s first novel is one in which the strictures of sex, class, education and gender are all seen as impediments to progress. The novel’s protagonist Bridget Ruan must work through and overcome these obstacles in different ways in order to achieve fully formed adulthood. In a fashion true to the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman Bridget must learn the lessons that her life teaches her to arrive at the beginning of selfhood.