Catherine Crowe: The freethinking nineteenth-century "medium" of science, fiction, and reform
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2025-04-21
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Catherine Crowe was a nineteenth-century British woman writing bestselling sensational fiction featuring amateur female detectives at the same moment as Edgar Allan Poe. However, her contributions to the establishment of detective fiction and other genres and movements has, until recent decades, been largely forgotten. This dissertation uses actor-network theory to investigate facets of Crowe’s unconventional life, career, influences, and legacy which have hitherto been obscured due to archival limitations and the attempts of several powerful journal editors to silence her public promotion of unorthodox egalitarian beliefs about women and science. Specifically, this study seeks to help restore Crowe to the historical record in the following ways. Chapter one explores some early influences whose intellectual and practical support helped launch her career and shape the ideas about women’s intellectual and economic independence she espouses in her fiction. Chapter two considers the ways Crowe and another woman in her science-minded reformist network, Harriet Martineau, sought to use their fiction as learning technologies to bring scientific instruction to readers otherwise excluded from scientific education. Chapter three explores Crowe’s role in fanning the flames of the British Spiritualist and American abolition movements and the ways she was punished by Charles Dickens, John Elliotson, and other men with scientific investments and literary connections for promoting her egalitarian scientific beliefs. Chapter four revises the persistent misconception that Crowe’s career effectively ended in 1854 and explores the ways her network aided her in returning to publishing: this final chapter considers the ways she responded to her detractors and continued boldly espousing her freethinking scientific beliefs in several late-career works which, I argue, are some of her most important. Ultimately, this study seeks to demonstrate the role Catherine Crowe played within her network to help shape several important nineteenth-century literary, reform, and scientific movements.
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English