The character and gender of the female detective as depicted in the crime novel, is greatly influenced and restricted by society's attitudes towards women at the time the books were written. This has been the case since one of the first female detectives, Mrs. Paschal, appeared in Revelations of a Lady Detective by W. S. Hayward in 1861 and continued with Agatha Christie's creation of Miss Marple in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930 and P. D. James's Cordelia Gray who appears in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman in 1972. The evolution of the modern female detective continued and Patricia Cornwell's character of Dr Kay Scarpetta as written about in Body of Evidence (1991) can be seen as a modern example of literature's female detective.
The detective genre can be said to have begun with Edgar Allen Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue, written in 1841, and featuring the male detective Dupin. The detective novels that followed were seen as “fairly rigidly defined according to a masculinist model [...] murder mysteries tend[ed] to glorify traditionally masculine values and to reinforce conservative social values.” (Reddy 7-8) Readers had to wait another twenty years before the first female detective was introduced by W. S. Hayward in his work Revelations of a Lady Detective, and even then the author had to give the character, Mrs. Paschal, a background that made it plausible and acceptable to readers that as a woman she could also be a detective.
The character of Mrs. Paschal is described as being a widow and this fact is important for the reader to be able to accept the idea of her as a female detective. With the death of her husband Mrs. Paschal was left close to financial ruin and Victorian society recognising the unfortunate circumstances of a woman who has lost her husband and means of family income, gave certain allowances to widows to enter into the realms of business and enterprise normally reserved for men, in order that she may provide for herself and her family. “Mrs. Paschal's [...] socially sanctioned freedom of movement that widowhood allows facilitate her detective work [...] Mrs. Paschal's widowhood peculiarly equips her to decipher clues and decode mysteries.” (Bredesen 21)
Mrs. Paschal's gender also influences the methods employed by the detective to solve the cases she is assigned to that contrasts with those methods of the male detective. Mrs. Paschal is able to, “infiltrate places where a man would look out of place, and employ a "feminine" knowledge (about clothing or dressmaking, for example) which often holds the vital clue to the mystery.” (Makinen 95)
In 1930, nearly seventy years after W. S. Hayward's Revelations of a Lady Detective, Agatha Christie's The Murder at the Vicarage is published by Collins and introduces another female detective to the world in the form of Miss Jane Marple. Miss. Marple differs to Mrs. Paschal in that she is an amateur sleuth not a fully paid detective. However, like Mrs. Paschal, the character of Miss Marple is influenced by the changing role played by women in society at the time.
The Murder at the Vicarage is set between the end of World War I and the start of World War II, which saw a change in the traditional role of what a woman could and could not do. While the men were away at war it was the women who kept the factories and farms going, and many remained in their jobs after the end of the war because of a shortage of men thanks to the high casualty rate in battle. As a character Miss Marple is a product of this change in society and the change in view on the traditional role of women in society. “What is surprising [...] after [...] the widespread feminization of male occupations during the Great War [...] and their increased opportunities for economic independence, was how long it took for Golden Age authors to conceive of female characters as [...] detectives.” (Rzepka 158)
However just because the role of women in society was changing, does not mean that this change was readily accepted by all. As Miss Marple presents her findings to Colonel Melchett and the Vicar near the end of The Murder at the Vicarage, the vicar comments to himself silently that Colonel Melchett “was impressed with the logical certainty of Miss Marple's conclusions. But for the moment he was not willing to admit it.” (Christie 365) This shows that the male Colonel Melchett still felt uncomfortable conceding that Miss Marple was right where he had been at a loss, and illustrates that some men still felt to be superior to their female counterparts and could not face being on level terms or even worse, being shown up by them.
