Sara Lodge, who teaches Victorian literature and culture at the University of St. Andrews, points out in “The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective” that these proto-Cagneys and ...

Created by ‘Britain’s Queen of Crime’, Miss Marple of St Mary Mead, an English town, is sharp, quick-witted, unassuming, and one of the earliest white-haired female detectives in literature.

Her female protagonists lack the normal trappings of selfhood: They have no names, ages, or detailed backgrounds. They are loners, dispassionate and disassociated, floating through foreign places ...

About a dozen pages into Michelle de Kretser’s new novel, “Theory & Practice,” she runs into the granite wall between truth and fiction. The narrative involves a young man dreaming of a woman.