A Scottish-Canadian Blethering On About Books

My interest in Anna Katherine Green was piqued by a survey of women detective fiction writers, and this set of linked short stories featuring detective Violet Strange was available free on the web, so I took the opportunity to read through it. Although this book was published in 1915 and is set contemporaneously with that, I was actually taken aback a little every time an automobile or a telephone was mentioned, so thoroughly nineteenth-century did the rest of Green's world seem. I was intrigued by the notion of an upper class woman, a socialite, doing detective work for money, albeit altruistically. Here, I think, is the American aspect - such a notion would have been completely anathema in English fiction. Even the redoubtable Miss Marple thirty years later wouldn't dream of being a professional! But Violet Strange is a professional very much on her own terms, and her methods lie ambivalently scattered across the divide between the sexes which Green is in no hurry to disrupt (when I found out later she was opposed to women's suffrage, it did not surprise me). So though Violet is described as intelligent and focused, and does indeed give evidence of considerable reasoning power, setting traps for her suspects, she thinks of her own strengths in terms of her intuition - her "soft skills", if you were, in understanding people, as is entirely appropriate to a woman. And, unlike her male counterparts, she is not allowed to depart a violent case without being emotionally disturbed and decidedly guilt-ridden about any part she has taken in it. Here are just a few quotations that struck me enough to scribble them down:

Who could dream that back of this display of mingled childishness and audacity there lay hidden purpose, intellect and a keen knowledge of human nature.

"When I hear or read of a case which contains any baffling features, I am apt to feel some hidden chord in my nature thrill to one fact in it and not to any of the others."

[when challenged by her male "boss"]: "My opinion is a girl's opinion, but such as it is you have the right to hear it."

"... she, Violet Strange, on whom strong men had come to rely in critical hours calling for well-balanced judgment."

"A woman's mind is strangely penetrating, and yours, I am told, has an intuitive faculty more to be relied upon than the reasoning of men."

In the end, Violet's "own problem" is that her sister has been disowned by her father, and requires financial as well as moral support. Since it involves the exercise of a womanly virtue (family compassion), this is, it seems, adequate pretext for Violet to cross the gender boundaries into the world of detecting. But now I would like to read some of Green's earlier work, where she also has female detectives, to see if this view of the feminine, so bizarre to a modern sensibility, is characteristic, or if she rang the changes in her female types over the course of her very long career.