St Andrews sleuth shortlisted

Sara Lodge of the School of English at the University of St Andrews has been shortlisted for the Wolfson Prize, Britain's most prestigious prize for history writing. The shortlist of six titles celebrates books which combine excellence in research with readability.

Previous winners of the award – which at £50,000 is worth as much as the Booker Prize – include the popular historians Mary Beard, William Dalrymple, and Simon Schama.

Lodge's book, The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective, was published by Yale University Press in 2024, receiving rave reviews. The fruit of over ten years of painstaking research, it shows the interplay between fantasy and reality in depictions of women investigators throughout the 1800s. Lodge establishes, for the first time, the extent to which Victorian women – as early as the 1850s – were working in a detective role for the police. From Dundee to Dover, women were engaged in searching and shadowing suspects and sometimes undertook risky sting operations.

Her book also uncovers the dark secrets of Victorian private detective agencies. These routinely deployed women, especially in divorce cases where a sleuth posing as a housemaid or lodger could more easily infiltrate a property where adultery was suspected. As Lodge reveals, real nineteenth-century female detectives were often working-class women, who might also be single mothers. Their jobs involved moral ambiguity, but detection opened a profession to women that offered increasing power, knowledge, and mobility. Entrepreneurial divorcee Antonia Moser and actress-detective Kate Easton, who founded their own enquiry agencies, used their position to assert women's right to vote.

On the Victorian stage, meanwhile, the fantasy figure of the female detective played to audiences of 4,000 working-class theatregoers a night. Gun-toting, fist-swinging, cross-dressing, and pun-loving, the imagined female sleuth was the ancestor of action heroines Jennifer Lawrence and Sigourney Weaver: mature, physically indomitable, the scourge of men who abuse women.

Sara Lodge, who is due to be formally promoted to Professor on 2nd December – the same day as the Wolfson prize ceremony, – said "I'm thrilled and honoured to be on the Wolfson shortlist. It's astonishing to think of myself alongside writers who have long been my scholarly heroes and heroines. Women’s history has never been more important than it is now when, in many parts of the world, it is under threat of erasure. I’m very grateful for the opportunities I've had to become a scholarly detective, unearthing the stories of women whose cleverness and courage deserve to be remembered."