Rivaling Conan Doyle: L. T. Meade’s Medical Mysteries, New Woman Criminals, and Literary Celebrity at the Victorian Fin de Siècle

IN DECEMBER 1898, readers of the popular Strand Magazine (1891–1950) who were fond of titbits and gossip turned to the long-running illustrated feature “Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times of their Lives” for “a closer acquaintance” with Mrs. L. T. Meade.¹ Meade (1844–1914), deemed “one of the most popular contributors to the Strand Magazine,” was praised for her early literary successes with her girls’ books and commended for her industry. Most readers would have recognized her as the author of trendsetting girls’ school stories and the former editor of the highly regarded middle-class girls’ literary magazine Atalanta (1887–1898), but as her stories began to appear in the Strand in the summer of 1893, she gained additional recognition as the creator of compelling scientific and medical mysteries. Her series Stories from the Diary of a Doctor (1893–1895) competed directly with the final instalments of Arthur Conan Doyle’s celebrated Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891–1893); her latest series, The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (1898), featuring the criminal machinations of the sinister female gang leader Madame Koluchy, had just concluded. Meade’s elevated status in the most successful middle-class magazine of the period expanded her public image from popular girls’ writer to include celebrity author of adult crime fiction. As a professional woman writer, she must have been pleased with the Strand’s recognition. “Portraits of Celebrities” included not only literary celebrities, but also artists, musicians, scientists, statesmen, bishops, generals, aristocrats, and crowned heads of state. It conferred status and significant market advantage to an ambitious writer and signalled to Meade that she had achieved her youthful ambition to win “a niche in the temple of fame.”²

But Meade’s celebrity was short-lived. Although she authored close to three hundred books and countless short stories, like many nineteenth-century women writers of popular literature, her name is now little known. In the decades following her death, she was remembered (if at all) as the author of formulaic girls’ fiction judged to have little merit. More recently, however, critics have looked beyond her girls’ fiction to consider a wider range of her professional activity in the literary and cultural contexts of her time.³ This discussion focuses on the best-selling author at a turning point in her career when she resigned her position as editor of Atalanta in order to take advantage of the new opportunities presented by the emergence of the Strand, a publication that was to have a profound influence on the literary market. This article highlights Meade’s professionalism and market savvy as well as her significant contributions to mystery and detective fiction through an examination of three of her most significant Strand series: Stories from the Diary of a Doctor, The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, and The Sorceress of the Strand (1902–1903). Focusing on a critical point in the career of one of the period’s most popular authors provides important insights into the ways in which professional women writers managed their careers and negotiated the fin-de-siècle literary marketplace.

Meade & the Popular Market

Meade’s early interest in the magazine that quickly gained the status of a national institution is not surprising. Beginning in the mid-1870s when she left rural Ireland for London where she hoped to establish herself as a writer, Meade built a successful career on the strength of her ability to gauge the literary market. She was particularly adept at following literary trends, frequently crafting her narratives by borrowing freely from her competitors’ work. Meade learned to exploit sensational incidents and topical issues to construct best-selling novels about street waifs, baby-farming, slum landlords, medical clinics for the poor, housing projects, mine disasters, and women’s employment. One of her most successful books, A World of Girls (1886), was written in direct response to intense public interest in girls’ education. The work established her as the founding author in the developing genre of the girls’ school story and secured her...