The female detective in British literature has roots as early as the 1790s. Attending to this figure's trajectory across the long nineteenth century brings to light a hundred years during which authors used the female detective to examine gender and, specifically, womanhood. Over this time, I argue, a shift in the figure's application occurs from the early attempts to elude the category of womanhood to embracing the binary through reformed notions of womanhood. The queer sensibility that characterizes the female detective in the Gothic and many midcentury novels diminishes as gender dissidence becomes more about modernizing womanhood within a gender binary. The female detective therefore becomes more conservative over time. I argue that the female detective negotiates her gender through her investigations. Rather than the happenstance of her narrative, her engagement in mystery-solving is the vehicle through which she eludes and reforms womanhood. Negotiations, including refutations, of womanhood have always been central to the detective figure: Prior to the consolidation of the detective genre in the first half of the twentieth century, the history of the female detective is laden with the side-stepping and reformation of what it means to be a woman. Female detective literature consciously mines the conventions and constraints that make "woman" and offers alternatives.
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