Mrs Radcliffe as Conan Doyle?

Abstract

In choosing the title ‘Mrs Radcliffe as Conan Doyle?’ provocation is intended. To a modern crime reader, the comparison seems at first unlikely; and from Linton it was not a feminist statement. She was a Victorian author whose youthful radicalism was abandoned for strident polemics against women’s rights, as in her famous essay ‘The Girl of the Period’. In the context of her memoir My Literary Life (1899) Linton is merely stating that Radcliffe and Conan Doyle were both popular and avidly read. But that she ranks the two as equivalent (the Sherlock Holmes series was just over a decade old, still in progress, not yet canonical), provides an intriguing line of speculation. Can a case be made for women, and Radcliffe, having major significance in early crime fiction, perhaps comparable to Conan Doyle?

Mrs Radcliffe was our Conan Doyle.

Eliza Lynn Linton, My Literary Life 87