Mysterious Ladies: Women and Detective Fiction

Mysterious Ladies: Women and Detective Fiction
Hannah Oliver

Three Mondays, June 4, 11, 18, 1-3 p.m.

Price: $75/65 members

A Body in the Library, Agatha Christie
Cards on the Table , Agatha Christie
Have His Carcase , Dorothy L. Sayers
Gaudy Night , Dorothy L. Sayers

Also recommended:

Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, ed. Michael Sims

Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe had a flock of sexy dames. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes had The Woman. But how do women authors depict female subjects in their detective fiction?

This class, the first in a series on women detective writers, will focus on the work of two contrasting British Golden Age authors: Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Long considered masters of the mystery genre, we will examine their work in light of their evolving cultural environments: the First World War and women’s changing societal roles. Literary critics suggest that detective fiction offers an unvarnished window into society, and Sayers and Christie may well have been the most accurate social commentators of their time. But do we do a disservice to their writing to view the result as the work of female authors discussing female issues, or are they the Miss Marples of literature, offering astute reports on their rapidly changing worlds?

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Hannah Oliver is a bookseller at Politics & Prose. She received her M.A. in Literature from American University. She has presented on detective fiction as it relates to existentialism at the Mid-Atlantic Popular Culture Association Conference, and on mystery authors at the National Popular Culture Association. She has also presented on modern medievalism, which was the subject of her graduate research, at the International Medieval Conference. She has taught two women’s history seminars at Carson-Newman College as well as served as a T.A. & research assistant at American University. Her passion is to foster discussion of classic works of literature in light of their societal settings and the impact they have had upon the popular imagination.