Anatomy of the Female Gentleman

Abstract

In female-authored British mystery novels of the interwar period, a common picture emerges of a particular idealized female whose traits are derived from those of the nineteenth-century gentleman. Superficially, the Female Gentleman of the 1920s and 1930s closely resembles the New Woman in terms of lifestyle. Female Gentlemen are very likely to dress, talk, and act like their brothers. They are often ‘hard-mouthed, cigarette-smoking females’, as one hostile young man describes them in Dorothy Sayers’ 1928 The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.¹ Cigarette smoking was perhaps not a distinctive trait by the modern period, and indeed characters of either sex who do not smoke are more unusual in these novels than ones who do. But the Female Gentlemen also tend to speak and even dress like men. They use previously unladylike slang and profanity — Miss Meteyard of Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise (1933) is introduced as a Somerville graduate who can make ‘the vulgarest limericks ever recited within these chaste walls’, while Dulcie Duveen of Christie’s The Murder on the Links (1923) begins the novel by looking out a train window ‘with the brief and forcible ejaculation “Hell!”’² They employ what the narrator of Georgette Heyer’s Death in the Stocks (1935) refers to as ‘paralysing frankness’.³