British Detective Fiction 1891–1901

Clarke, Clare

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-59563-8

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Here, the scientist-narrator Norman Head is pitted against a "great lady doctor," the master-criminal Madame Katherine Koluchy (Meade and Eustace 1898: 656). The gendered and professional politics underpinning Meade's medical mysteries have been interrogated by literary scholars (see Pittard 2011;Clarke 2020). "A Cast for a Fortune" is perhaps more subversive in its approach to both aspects; it similarly sets a doctor-detective against a doctor-villain, but assigns the former function to a female physician.…”

Section: Literary Lineagementioning

confidence: 99%

The Medical Woman as Amateur Detective in Anna Kingsford’s ‘A Cast for a Fortune: The Holiday Adventures of a Lady Doctor.’

Moulds¹

2021

VPFJ

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Anna Kingsford’s “A Cast for a Fortune: The Holiday Adventures of a Lady Doctor” (1877) depicts a medical woman who becomes entangled in a murder plot whilst on vacation. Assuming the mantle of amateur detective, Dr Mary Thornton intervenes to prevent Dr George Pomeroy poisoning his sister-in-law, a wealthy widow. This little-known short story appeared at a critical time in the medical-woman movement in Britain. In contemporary medical writing and popular culture, the woman doctor was often represented as unfeminine and even as morbid or morally degenerate. Conversely, Kingsford portrays a healthy woman doctor who upholds professional ethics and criminal justice, while the story’s medical man is an unscrupulous villain. By exposing and denouncing Dr Pomeroy, Dr Thornton restores medicine’s reputation. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across literary studies and the history of medicine, this article positions Kingsford’s story at the advent and nexus of three emerging sub-genres: female detective fiction, the medical mystery, and medical woman fiction. I argue that, through the depiction of its heroine, “A Cast for a Fortune” constructs the amateur female sleuth and early woman doctor not as an outsider, but as the guardian of medico-morality.

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Section: Literary Lineagementioning

confidence: 99%