V Conclusion

I have attempted to explain the emergence of the female detective novelist by means of two different sets of circumstances which enabled the two first female representatives of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction to penetrate the male bastion of detection so successfully. Leaving aside personal talent as almost impossible to capture though indispensable for any literary career, I have hypothesised that two seemingly contradictory factors form the basis of these two women's rise to the highest rank among writers of detective fiction both at their time and today.

The first factor is constituted by the general emancipation of British women between the turn of the century and the mid-1920s; this period correlates with the first 35 and 28 (respectively) years of Agatha Christie's and Dorothy L. Sayers's lives. The socio-historic changes brought about by the political, economical and social upheavals of the First World War liberated many women, working-class, middle-class and upper-middle class, to perform and excel at jobs and professions previously exclusive to men. In the socio-historical climate of these changes, barriers against the conquest of male-dominated areas were low both in a practical and in a psychological sense. The practical side is that during the war, women were in high demand as workers, but also as, for example, writers. The psychological side is that many women then possessed an ingrained comprehension of their own abilities and were assertive of the fact that there remained few things a woman was less capable of doing than a man. Thus the socio-historic background favoured an atmosphere of progressive thinking that cannot have failed to influence the individual career choices of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.

The second factor, apparently antonymous to the first, is the two author's individual development. Both women came from upper middle-class families of slightly different grain. Agatha Christie's background is rural, Dorothy L. Sayers's academic, but as far as the essential values, beliefs and mental categories are concerned, there is a significant similarity in their traditional adherence to basic Christian views, moral integrity, lawfulness and the clear differentiation between 'good' and 'evil'. With slight variances that I have deduced to be grounded in the difference between a rural middle-class upbringing and an academic middle-class upbringing, the value systems of both author's are essentially identical. It is this fundamental conservativism that predominantly augmented the two women's production of detective fiction.

In the final section of the treatise, I have ventured to prove the thesis that socio-historic changes and individual development permitted the emergence of the female detective novelist by implementing the correlation between actual women, fictional women and the two authors. Maintaining that my thesis is borne out in the literature, I have accumulated the authors' fictional women into categories and then synthesised them in relation to actual women on the one hand and Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers on the other hand.

All in all, I claim that for the emergence of the female detective novelist, the individual author's development commenced from a conservative childhood and adolescence which continued into a formative time of progressive socio-historic turbulence to complete itself in the production of a genre that lends itself perfectly to the conservative attitudes of a progressive (relative to the era) female novelist. Thus the paradox of progressive conservativism is solved.