written by Catherine Louisa Pirkis (1839–1910) was Disappeared from Her Home (1877), a mystery novel that lays the foundation of what was to become her best-known work, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1894), a short story collection featuring the eponymous character, who is significant in the history of the detective story.
Unlike many of her Victorian sisters in crime, Loveday Brooke is not a breathtaking young beauty with endless energy and resources who becomes involved in solving crimes for the sport of it. She works for a private detective agency out of necessity. As Pirkis writes, “Some five or six years previously, by a jerk of Fortune’s wheel, Loveday had been thrown upon the world penniless and all but friendless. Marketable accomplishments she had found she had none, so she had forthwith defied convention, and had chosen for herself a career that had cut her off sharply from her former associates and her position in society.”
She is past thirty when her adventures are recorded, and she is as ordinary in appearance as it is possible for someone to be, which proves to be a significant asset in her profession, and she makes no great effort to be anything else. “Her dress was invariably black,” Pirkis writes, “and was almost Quaker-like in its neat primness.”
Ebenezer Dyer, the chief of the detective agency, describes her as “the most sensible and practical woman I ever met.” Brooke functions very much in the manner of Sherlock Holmes. She makes observations about physical objects and then eliminates all but one possible conclusion. Her skill at ratiocination inevitably leads to a solution, and she explains—usually at the conclusion of the case—the observations she’s made and the unerring deductions to which they led.
“The Redhill Sisterhood” was originally published in the April 1893 issue of The Ludgate Monthly; it was first collected in The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (London, Hutchinson, 1894).