"Is it possible that success has turned my brain?"
-- Madame Sara prepares to meet her fate in "The Teeth of the Wolf" (245)
The prolific L.T. Meade wrote popular girls' fiction before going into competition with Arthur Conan Doyle in series of short thrillers, featuring her own recurring first-person male narrators who hunt international conspiracies of anarchists and thieves, but headed, in her versions, by glamorous female masterminds. One of the most successful was The Sorceress of the Strand (1902), originally appearing in The Strand magazine, in which the titular Sorceress, Madame Sara, operates out of her business as a "professional beautifier" (120). Her elegant salon offers cutting-edge dentistry and plastic surgery alongside cosmetics and hair styling, and provides her with open access to the rich and powerful.
While Madame Sara targets some male victims in these stories, often in the interest of expanding her criminal influence, the most interesting relationships are those she forges with her young women clients, who revere her even as she exploits them for her own ends. Given the limited opportunities most women have, the role model of a successful, independent woman has great power over their imaginations. When confronted with her criminal activity, it's easy for them to believe Madame Sara is being unjustly persecuted by men who want to put her back in her place. As one of them says, "He would be sure to suspect any very clever woman" (213).
The stories include an emphasis on good manners and honorable behavior, where enemies make their plans known, and assume that all sides will abide by agreements. This creates the sense of a bygone, more naive time, also noticeable when one character, a police sergeant, no less, asks "Is this is a civilized country when death can walk abroad like this, invisible, not to be avoided?" (134)
My personal favorite tale was probably the haunted house outing "The Face of the Abbott," in which it's drily noted that "ghosts have a way of suppressing themselves when most earnestly desired to put in an appearance" (175). I also enjoyed the character of Madame Sara frenemy Mrs. Bensasan, "the best tamer of wild animals in Europe" (231), another fairly unconventional path that it's nice to see represented, even if the character herself is pretty unlikable, trying to control her daughter as much as any patriarch.
True to the tales' international flavor, the background characters are of varied ethnicity, and some of this material is casually dismissive, like the cavalier treatment of a courtly Persian delegate, certain to be executed for the theft of a jewel, who's just collateral damage in the detectives' schemes to capture their prey.
The Madame Sara stories are available online through the University of Pennsylvania. I read the Broadview Press edition, which is great as always, with a lot of interesting supporting material. It collects all the stories in the "Sorceress of the Strand" cycle, along with "Other Stories" that feature similarly sinister female Moriarty types (and a few seemingly sweet young things with secret agendas).
Meade's contemporary E.A. Bennett, whose review appears in this volume's appendices, does have a point about the style when he states that "there is no padding whatever; incident follows incident with the curtness of an official dispatch" (258). Characterization is very thin, and the protagonist detective characters lack any meaningful interior life, or even the kind of background context that we get for Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, which makes the more famous detectives much more memorable. .
Meade's comments in an interview about writing for the market, also included in the Broadview Press edition, suggests that the shift in magazine fiction, from serialized novels to singular short narratives with recurring characters (exemplified by the Sherlock Holmes series) may have stifled her style: "It is so difficult to make one's points tell in short stories" (254).
-- Madame Sara prepares to meet her fate in "The Teeth of the Wolf" (245)
The prolific L.T. Meade wrote popular girls' fiction before going into competition with Arthur Conan Doyle in series of short thrillers, featuring her own recurring first-person male narrators who hunt international conspiracies of anarchists and thieves, but headed, in her versions, by glamorous female masterminds. One of the most successful was The Sorceress of the Strand (1902), originally appearing in The Strand magazine, in which the titular Sorceress, Madame Sara, operates out of her business as a "professional beautifier" (120). Her elegant salon offers cutting-edge dentistry and plastic surgery alongside cosmetics and hair styling, and provides her with open access to the rich and powerful.
While Madame Sara targets some male victims in these stories, often in the interest of expanding her criminal influence, the most interesting relationships are those she forges with her young women clients, who revere her even as she exploits them for her own ends. Given the limited opportunities most women have, the role model of a successful, independent woman has great power over their imaginations. When confronted with her criminal activity, it's easy for them to believe Madame Sara is being unjustly persecuted by men who want to put her back in her place. As one of them says, "He would be sure to suspect any very clever woman" (213).
The stories include an emphasis on good manners and honorable behavior, where enemies make their plans known, and assume that all sides will abide by agreements. This creates the sense of a bygone, more naive time, also noticeable when one character, a police sergeant, no less, asks "Is this is a civilized country when death can walk abroad like this, invisible, not to be avoided?" (134)
My personal favorite tale was probably the haunted house outing "The Face of the Abbott," in which it's drily noted that "ghosts have a way of suppressing themselves when most earnestly desired to put in an appearance" (175). I also enjoyed the character of Madame Sara frenemy Mrs. Bensasan, "the best tamer of wild animals in Europe" (231), another fairly unconventional path that it's nice to see represented, even if the character herself is pretty unlikable, trying to control her daughter as much as any patriarch.
True to the tales' international flavor, the background characters are of varied ethnicity, and some of this material is casually dismissive, like the cavalier treatment of a courtly Persian delegate, certain to be executed for the theft of a jewel, who's just collateral damage in the detectives' schemes to capture their prey.
The Madame Sara stories are available online through the University of Pennsylvania. I read the Broadview Press edition, which is great as always, with a lot of interesting supporting material. It collects all the stories in the "Sorceress of the Strand" cycle, along with "Other Stories" that feature similarly sinister female Moriarty types (and a few seemingly sweet young things with secret agendas).
Meade's contemporary E.A. Bennett, whose review appears in this volume's appendices, does have a point about the style when he states that "there is no padding whatever; incident follows incident with the curtness of an official dispatch" (258). Characterization is very thin, and the protagonist detective characters lack any meaningful interior life, or even the kind of background context that we get for Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, which makes the more famous detectives much more memorable. .
Meade's comments in an interview about writing for the market, also included in the Broadview Press edition, suggests that the shift in magazine fiction, from serialized novels to singular short narratives with recurring characters (exemplified by the Sherlock Holmes series) may have stifled her style: "It is so difficult to make one's points tell in short stories" (254).
Meade, L T, and Janis Dawson. The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2016.
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