‘A good deal of risk … and a chance of danger’: Detection, Adventure, and Violence in Beatrice Heron-Maxwell’s The Adventures of a Lady Pearl-Broker

Gavin discusses Beatrice Heron-Maxwell’s The Adventures of a Lady Pearl-Broker (1899), arguing that the novel reveals a counter-narrative to female professional success in the 1890s of male violence to women which serves as a kind of ‘#MeToo’ testimony. Subject to repeated threats, attacks, drugging, and imprisonment, Heron-Maxwell’s ‘lady detective’ Mollie Delamere is a professionally accomplished pearl-broker, but only at the cost of repeatedly risking her life, while the male perpetrators of violence against her are neither arrested nor punished. Gavin argues that female detectives’ ultimate difficulty is not (or not as centrally) what critics have argued is the either/or of marriage and detection (or career), but rather the check of male threats and violence on women’s public and professional progression. In this way, notwithstanding that its episodes are pitched as adventures, The Adventures of a Lady Pearl-Broker is inherently a novel of protest about male violence towards women and about systems of secrecy that, explicitly or implicitly, collude in profiting from that violence.