In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Bringing Back L. T. Meade
  • Caroline Hovanec
L. T. Meade. The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories. Janis Dawson, ed. Peterborough: Broadview, 2016. 211 pp. Paper $19.95

IN OR ABOUT DECEMBER 1890, the first issue of the Strand was published, and the character of commercial British fiction changed. The Strand, under the editorship of George Newnes, quickly developed a reputation as an amusing, not-too-demanding middle-class magazine, [End Page 141] full of newsy "tit-bits" and short stories that could be read in a single sitting. Many other imitators sprung up shortly thereafter, aiming to recreate the Strand's success, but none unseated it as the dominant literary periodical of the 1890s. The Strand's specialty was crime fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories were first published in its pages and, arguably, made the publication's name. Over the next fifty years, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, G. K. Chesterton, P. G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers all contributed stories of their own. The Strand also published mystery stories by a writer whose name, today, is much more obscure than those beloved writers, and yet who was a literary celebrity in her own time: L. T. Meade. The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories, edited by Janis Dawson, aims to bring Meade out of the archives and back into the canon of late-Victorian and Edwardian print culture.

Born in rural Ireland in 1844, Meade moved to London in 1875. There she began her literary career in earnest with the writing of Lettie's Last Home, a sensation novel in which alcoholism, murder, and baby-farming ("a practice whereby parents unable or unwilling to care for an infant consigned it to a guardian for a fee," as Dawson helpfully explains) feature prominently. After Lettie's Last Home, Meade began writing stories and novels for girls, a gig that won her the editorship of the girls' magazine Atalanta in 1887. A few years later, however, Meade sensed a change in the literary market. Readers were flocking to crime fiction, and Meade saw an opening for a new kind of story: the medical mystery, in which a protagonist with the gifts of Sherlock Holmes and the training of Dr. Watson uses his esoteric medical and scientific knowledge to solve crimes. It is on this part of Meade's writing life—between 1893, when she began collaborating with the doctors Edgar Beaumont and Robert Eustace Barton on the series Stories from the Diary of a Doctor, and 1903, when her series The Sorceress of the Strand (published, of course, in the Strand), concluded—that Dawson focuses.

Dawson bookends nine selected stories from this period of Meade's career with an introduction and five appendices of supplementary materials, all of which aim to place the stories in their historical context. Meade had a finger on the pulse of late-Victorian literary trends and social anxieties, and, Dawson argues, her work touches on every-thing [End Page 142] from dynamite stories and invasion narratives to degeneration theory and the medicalization of crime to the alluring, threatening New Woman. The appendices include selections from twenty primary sources, ranging from contemporaneous interviews with Meade to Lombroso's writings on degenerate criminality to newspaper articles on "dynamite outrages" and the English fear of anarchism. They also include literary excerpts from Wells's The Time Machine, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, exemplifying more famous treatments of the same themes that inspired Meade. The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories thus functions as a crash course in fin-de-siècle culture.

The common thread in the nine stories that Dawson has selected, and the most innovative aspect of Meade's crime fiction, is the presence of a beautiful, clever, and remorseless female villain. The most notable of these is the titular "sorceress" Madame Sara, an "ageless" and charming beautician who is beloved by all of London—except the narrator Dixon Druce and his friend Eric Vandeleur, a police surgeon, who alone know the nefarious truth of Sara's schemes. The Sorceress of the Strand stories, of which five are reproduced here, follow Druce...

pdf

Share