Detecting women's agency in 1920s Tasmania through a historical crime novel

Scholars have largely neglected the lives of everyday interwar Tasmanian women. My research aims to contribute new knowledge towards this overlooked scholarship through two interconnected components: a historical crime novel set in Tasmania in 1929 titled The West Hobart Lady Detective Agency Presents the Monthly Mysteries (shortened to Monthly Mysteries), and a critical exegesis of my creative, personal and historical research methods. Both my novel Monthly Mysteries and the accompanying exegesis preserve, examine and reimagine untold or ‘hidden’ histories of interwar Tasmanian women.
My practice-led thesis explores an understudied subject in historical scholarship: How much agency – social, economic, political and personal freedoms – would the average woman likely have experienced in 1920s rural Tasmania? I investigated this research question through archival research, an oral and family history study of the Tasmanian town of Derby, and my historical crime novel Monthly Mysteries. This interdisciplinary research – influenced by researchers of feminist, gender and women’s history (including Jill Matthews and Judith Smart), crime fiction studies (including Kathleen Klein and Rosemary Johnsen) and gender and feminist studies (including Andrea Pető, Judith Butler and Kate Manne) – examines how interwar gender norms, conflicting female stereotypes, and patriarchy controlled the agency of white women in 1920s rural Tasmania.
My thesis posits that most Tasmanian women in the 1920s would have lacked the agency, social license and opportunities to become a ‘lady detective’ or similarly veer into any profession traditionally considered male. My argument contradicts a common trope in contemporary western popular culture that the everyday 1920s woman had considerable agency including stereotypes like the ‘lady detective’ and ‘flapper’ depicted in recent films, series and novels set in the Roaring Twenties. On the contrary, and drawing on my extensive historical research, Monthly Mysteries and its exegesis argue it would have been difficult for the average Australian woman in the late 1920s to become a detective—and particularly in rural Tasmania. By 1929, the year my novel is set, there was a general backlash across the western world against female freedoms gained since World War I.
Monthly Mysteries offers readers a different kind of interwar female detective through which I explore women’s agency. My thesis demonstrates that rather than emulating the liberated ‘flapper’ stereotype, rural women in 1920s Tasmania exercised a more subtle agency through community, family, friendships, and ‘unofficial’ paid employment. My historical crime novel provides a subversive exploration of modern womanhood which, although fictional, is authentic to my historical study of female agency, cultural norms, and patriarchal ideals in 1920s rural Tasmania.

The exegetical component of this thesis demonstrates how the two female detectives in Monthly Mysteries function as effective and unique literary devices through which to engage meaningfully with my archival and oral history study of interwar Tasmania, to examine 1920s female agency, and to challenge contemporary notions of the modern woman. Historical crime fiction allowed me to use imagination, speculation and lived experience to fill in gaps and inconsistencies inherent in historical accounts of the past. I conclude that traditional detective fiction – although formulaic – provides the writer and the reader with a familiar, engaging and accessible format through which to reanimate, learn about and explore the lives and agency of women often neglected in history; and to contemplate the advances and injustices in women’s agency today.