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Summary Of Maureen T. Reddy's 'Women Detectives'

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4. Summary on “Women Detectives” by Maureen T. Reddy Introduction In this chapter, Maureen T. Reddy analyzes the development of crime fiction in the aspect of the rise of female novelists and women detectives in crime fiction through enumerating various writers with their magnum opus. Therefore, the origin of female detectives and the changes of feminist crime fiction will be summarized in this passage. Summary In the first part of this chapter, the author illustrates that female novelists and women detectives of crime fiction can be found in gothic and sensation fiction during the Golden Age (Reddy 191). On the one hand, Ann Radcliffe portrays an innocent and victimized female protagonist, who, however, serves like a detective, in her famous gothic fiction, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1796) (Reddy 191). On the other hand, even though sensation fiction …show more content…

For one thing, with the success of Katherine V. Forrest’s Kate Delafield series, lesbian detectives were characterized by an established lesbian identity, amateurs as detectives and emphasizing the significance of female relationships, and consequently, such genre of crime fiction was recognized by the society (Reddy 200-01). For the other thing, from the 1990s (Reddy 201), female writers and women detectives of color appeared on the stage of the feminist crime fiction. It is demonstrated by the author that these black female writers made giant effects on this genre, especially in the aspect of changing the traditions made by white feminist writers, such as including racial and class issues (Reddy 202). Hitherto, colored female writers have presented their characteristics of depicting “black female consciousness”, introducing “the intersections of race and gender”, having “interest in colourism”, and so forth (Reddy

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