
The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective
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Narrated by:
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Christine Rendel
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By:
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Sara Lodge
About this listen
A revelatory history of the women who brought Victorian criminals to account—and how they became a cultural sensation.
From Wilkie Collins to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the traditional image of the Victorian detective is male. Few people realize that women detectives successfully investigated Victorian Britain, working both with the police and for private agencies, which they sometimes managed themselves.
Sara Lodge recovers these forgotten women’s lives. She also reveals the sensational role played by the fantasy female detective in Victorian melodrama and popular fiction, enthralling a public who relished the spectacle of a cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroine who got the better of love rats, burglars, and murderers alike.
How did the morally ambiguous work of real women detectives, sometimes paid to betray their fellow women, compare with the exploits of their fictional counterparts, who always save the day? Lodge’s book takes us into the murky underworld of Victorian society on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing the female detective as both an unacknowledged laborer and a feminist icon.
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Story
Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more. But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work.
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Is you enjoy a Lucy Worsley book or deep dive documentary, you’ll love Jane Austen’s Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney.
- By J. B. on 02-20-25
By: Rebecca Romney
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Hunting the Falcon
- Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and the Marriage That Shook Europe
- By: John Guy, Julia Fox
- Narrated by: Stephanie Racine
- Length: 17 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Hunting the Falcon is the story of how Henry VIII’s obsessive desire for Anne Boleyn changed him and his country forever. John Guy and Julia Fox, two of the most acclaimed and distinguished historians of this period, have joined forces to present Anne and Henry in startlingly new ways.
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Superb book and superb narration!
- By Buffy Martin Tarbox on 11-01-23
By: John Guy, and others
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Normal Women
- Nine Hundred Years of Making History
- By: Philippa Gregory
- Narrated by: Philippa Gregory, Clare Corbett, Tania Rodrigues, and others
- Length: 27 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Did you know that there are more penises than women in the Bayeux Tapestry? That the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was started and propelled by women who were protesting a tax on women? Or that Charles Darwin believed not just that women were naturally inferior to men, but that they’d evolve to become ever more inferior? These are just a few of the startling findings you will learn from listening to Philippa Gregory’s Normal Women. In this ambitious book, she tells the story of England over 900 years, for the very first time placing women—some fifty per cent of the population—center stage.
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Well researched
- By Tom Masters on 05-31-24
By: Philippa Gregory
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The Dressmakers of Auschwitz
- The True Story of the Women Who Sewed to Survive
- By: Lucy Adlington
- Narrated by: Lucy Adlington
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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At the height of the Holocaust, 25 young inmates of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp - mainly Jewish women and girls - were selected to design, cut, and sew beautiful fashions for elite Nazi women in a dedicated salon. It was work that they hoped would spare them from the gas chambers. This fashion workshop - called the Upper Tailoring Studio - was established by Hedwig Höss, the camp commandant’s wife, and patronized by the wives of SS guards and officers.
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Not what I expected given description and preview
- By Kaeli Mathes on 09-24-21
By: Lucy Adlington
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Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife
- The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women
- By: Hetta Howes
- Narrated by: Amy Noble
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife charts the lives and times of four medieval women writers—Marie de France, a poet; Julian of Norwich, a mystic and anchoress; Christine de Pizan, a widow and court writer; and Margery Kempe, a no-good wife—who all bucked convention and forged their own paths. Largely forgotten by modern readers, these women have an astonishing amount to teach us about love, marriage, motherhood, friendship, and earning a living.
By: Hetta Howes
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Invisible Women
- Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
- By: Caroline Criado Perez
- Narrated by: Caroline Criado Perez
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, treating men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this bias in time, money, and often with their lives. Celebrated feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez investigates the shocking root cause of gender inequality and research in Invisible Women.
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A statistical fire hose
- By B. Andresen on 09-11-19
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The Radium Girls
- The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women
- By: Kate Moore
- Narrated by: Angela Brazil
- Length: 15 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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The year was 1917. As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks, and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun job, lucrative and glamorous - the girls themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered head to toe in the dust from the paint. They were the radium girls. As the years passed, the women began to suffer from mysterious and crippling illnesses.
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A simple way to improve the robotic narration
- By B. C. French on 06-07-17
By: Kate Moore