Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 94
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Popular Culture Review
long-held conventions, not only of this literary genre but also o f society at large2.
British novelist Anne Perry is one such writer. In her second mystery series, which
at present includes nine novels starring inspector William Monk and the nurse
Hester Latterly,3Perry creates detective fiction with a twist, for her female sleuth’s
liminality is linked explicitly to Perry’s project of interrogating dominant versions
of history through her fiction. As a writer of what Jo Ellyn Clarey has called “feminist
history-mystery,”4 Perry sets her novels in Victorian England, weaving her stories
within a rich tapestry of arcane medical treatments, soap recipes, and social
ideologies from the nineteenth century. Set in the 1850s, this series explores the
history of nursing, the centerpiece of this history being Hester Latterly. Though
Monk is the investigator of record in these novels, Latterly operates in effect as an
amateur detective whose intervention is nearly always crucial to the solution of
Monk’s cases. She is a successful sleuth, of course, precisely because of her liminal
status: unlike Sherlock Holmes, who must use disguise to slip up and down the
social ladder, Hester occupies the threshold between the different registers of identity
she embodies strategically. This essay assesses the ways in which her status as a
nurse in the 1850s— as an upper-class woman whose experiences nursing in the
Crimean War have allowed her to cross boundaries of gender, class, and vocation—
is essential to this liminality and mobility among social categories. Indeed, an
author designing a liminal sleuth could hardly have chosen a more appropriate
milieu. In setting her character in the years immediately following the war, in
which Florence Nightingale initiated nursing reform, Perry immerses Hester in a
period in which the role and stature of nursing were in question. No longer only a
trade, nursing was not yet a profession, a status whose very uncertainty yields a
rich field of possibilities for Hester’s character. Furthermore, Perry’s choice of this
particular moment grants her character national significance, in that Nightingale’s
nurses were self-conscious supporters of the Empire as it pursued its interests in
the Crimea; Nightingale constructed her nurses as angelic “ladies” brought to
alleviate the suffering in a war infamous for its poor management, needless misery
and maltreatment of soldiers. In revisiting this formative historical moment, Perry
not only expands popular understanding of women’s roles and experiences in the
mid-nineteenth century; she also creates the ideal liminal sleuth who needs no
disguise to venture into many of the striated identities available in Victorian society.
The uncertain status of nursing in this particular historical era provides such a
rich context for Perry’s mystery series because it was so inherently connected to
other crucial issues, including gender roles, class identities, and ideologies of work.
In the early 1850s in England, nursing was viewed as at best an unskilled trade, at
worst “a trough of inefficiency and immorality” (Abel-Smith 4-5). Through her
work in the Crimean War and subsequent campaigns at home, Florence Nightingale
attempted to reform the image and practice of nursing, constructing it as a divine