20th November 2025, 7.30 pm at the Holy Trinity Church – Professor Sara Lodge.
Many people imagine that women played no part at all in Victorian policing and that women private eyes in the nineteenth century are purely imaginary. My talk will reveal the surprising world of the real Victorian female detective. Exploring the lives of women who worked with the police and with private enquiry agencies, it will show how important women were both to law enforcement and to solving personal mysteries. One of these cases took place at Colstoun House, Haddington in 1897…and led to a trial in which the lady detective and her aristocratic employer fought a very public courtroom battle. Reflecting on how much the Victorians enjoyed — as we do today — the spectacle of a feisty, fist-swinging female sleuth in the theatre, I will consider the differences between myth and reality, and why the truth about the Victorian female detective lay hidden for so long.
Sara Lodge is Professor of nineteenth-century literature and culture at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of four books and many articles: she writes regularly for papers including the Scotsman, the Times Literary Supplement and the Wall Street Journal. She is also an experienced radio broadcaster, whose documentaries have appeared on RTE Lyric FM and other stations. Her latest book, The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective was featured on Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio London, in the Guardian, the Telegraph (which gave it five stars and dubbed it ‘a joy to read’), the Sunday Times (which called it ‘a revelation’) and the Scotsman (which picked it as one of the Scottish Books of the Year 2024). It has been shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, Britain’s biggest prize for history writing. She’s now working on her next book, The Haunted Causeway: magic, pilgrimage and imagination on the paths to Britain’s tidal islands. She’s also hoping to turn her research on Victorian female detectives into a drama series.