Nineteenth-Century Female Crime Writers and the Marriage Debate

• In Event: 19th-Century Russophone Women Writers III: Memoirs by Actresses and Midwives, Crime Fiction, and Screenplays

Abstract

This paper considers how female crime writers in the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire reflected and interrogated issues related to women’s rights within marriage. It will discuss Kapitolina Nazar’eva’s fascinating 1879 narrative ‘Специалист’, first published in Вестник Европы, which gives a first-person female account of attempts to secure a divorce from the consistory court. I will then examine how this work informs later works of female-authored crime fiction and their depiction of marriage. Reference will be made to Nazar’eva’s Мститель (1894) and Liudmila Simonova’s 1883 novel Убила in which the use of narrative mirroring effectively conveys a sense of the ubiquity and inescapability of violence within marriage.

Author

• Claire Whitehead, U of St. Andrews (UK)