Adventures of Susan Hopley was written by Catherine Crowe. Crowe (1800-1872) is completely forgotten today, but in her time she was a figure of some repute. Susan Hopley was a bestseller and popular as a play, Crowe’s The Night Side of Nature (1848)—an investigation of psychic phenomena—was well-known and influential, and Crowe herself was a respected figure among the Edinburgh intelligentsia. No less than Charles Dickens thought well of Susan Hopley, describing it as “rather a clever story.”¹ Modern readers will find it clever, and historically significant, but not a particularly good read.

Susan Hopley is the child of a poor family. As children Susan and her brother Andrew are taken into the service of the Leesons, members of the shabby gentility. The Leesons' son is Harry, and he and Susan and Andrew become friends. After the Leesons die the group are taken in by the Wentworths, Mrs. Leeson's uncle. Harry is due to receive a great fortune from Mr. Wentworth. The rest of the fortune will go to Wentworth’s daughter, Fanny. Fanny is engaged to Walter Gaveston, who is a handsome man who excels at manly exercises like sports, but who has no great taste for work and in fact is a rotter through and through. Gaveston wants the whole fortune for himself and is willing to do anything to get it. He first tries to drown Harry, but Andrew saves him. Gaveston then murders Mr. Wentworth and Andrew (though Gaveston's culpability is not established until much later) and engineers the disappearance of Mabel Jones, a servant, so that it appears that Andrew murdered Mr. Wentworth for his money and then eloped with Mabel. In addition to this, the will which will give Harry his share of the inheritance vanishes. The rest of the novel concerns the lives of Susan and a large cast of characters and their efforts to find happiness and undo the injustices done to them by others, usually by Mr. Gaveston (under assumed names) and Mr. Gaveston's servants (also under assumed names). By the end of the novel several wrongs have been righted, Mr. Gaveston has been shamed, his vileness exposed to the world (he commits suicide as a result), and Susan lives happily ever after as Harry Leeson's housekeeper and best friend. (In a sequel, The Story of Lilly Dawson [1847], Susan is discovered to be a Colonel’s daughter and is saved from a life of maid-work and drudgery).

Susan Hopley is supposedly a novel of “domestic realism,” a story of the lives, frustrations, and triumphs of women in their daily lives. Novels of domestic realism were a reaction against Romanticism, and dwelt on the materialistic and the quotidian. In the early 1840s a novel like Susan Hopley would not have been thought of as anything except a novel of domestic realism. Nor would Susan Hopley have been described as a mystery; that term was applied to Gothic novels rather than stories of crime and detection. There wasn’t a separate genre of mysteries when Susan Hopley was published, and neither writers, critics, or readers would have thought to articulate what Susan Hopley did as a novel about crimes and the solving of them.

But Susan Hopley is far more of a mystery than a novel of domestic realism. Susan Hopley has as its focus the attempt to solve a crime, and the novel has a main character who performs this detection and even examines the scene of a crime for evidence. However, Susan Hopley is a Proto-Mystery rather than a mystery proper. Most histories of the mystery genre place the modern founding of the genre at Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (see: The C. Auguste Dupin Mysteries). Susan Hopley predates “Rue Morgue” by a few months, and Susan Hopley was an almost immediate bestseller and was popular with all classes of readers as a novel and play; Poe could not have been unaware of it. Like Bulwer Lytton’s Night and Morning, which like Susan Hopley preceded the writing of “Rue Morgue” by a few months, Susan Hopley is a Proto-Mystery which was undoubtedly influential to some degree on the mystery writing of Poe, among others. Wilkie Collins used a maid-detective similar to Susan Hopley in his first crime story, “The Diary of Anne Rodway” (1856), and used the plot device of the incriminating fragment of clothing, an essential part of the resolution of Susan Hopley, in No Name (1862). Hopley herself is a maid rather than a professional detective, and her motives for solving the crimes in the novel are essentially personal rather than professional. She’s an amateur detective, similar to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Mlle. de Scudéry (see: “Mademoiselle de Scudéry”), although Hopley is more intimately connected to the crimes she solves than Mlle. de Scudéry is. “Susan is a successful detective figure…[but] Susan defies…patriarchal placement [back into the romance genre]; after her detective actions are successfully completed she is not returned, in Romantic tradition, to reassuring domesticity through marriage in the closure of the text.”² The marriage plot (see: “The Lady Detective”) does not apply here; Susan retains her independence after the detecting is complete.

All that being true, Susan Hopley is not, however, a particularly good novel. It is overly complex. The novel has a large cast of characters, the story takes a number of twists, and Crowe abandons plot threads only to pick them up dozens and in some cases hundreds of pages later. The characterization is average, and there is a certain stridency in the attempts to arouse feelings and emotions in the reader. Although the novel is about the domestic lives of women Crowe does not really convey a sense, to the modern reader, about what life was like at the time of the story. And Crowe has an unfortunate tendency to create likeable characters and then inflict bad things on them. However, there also are some moments and revelations which will surprise even experienced readers. Early in the novel Susan Hopley has a prophetic dream which is surprisingly eerie, and the moment when Mr. Gaveston is going to attempt to cut the throat of Julia, a woman he wronged, is genuinely shocking.

Susan Hopley is a dated novel, with a narrative awkwardness. Modern readers are not likely to want to finish the novel once they start it. But it has a certain innate cleverness—Hopley was far better as a plotter than as a story-teller, and as a historical artifact Susan Hopley is notable for its role in the history of detective fiction.

Print: Catherine Crowe, Adventures of Susan Hopley, or Circumstantial Evidence. Nashville, TN: Rarebooksclub.com, 2012.

Lucy Sussex, Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

¹ Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Angus Easson, eds., The Letters of Charles Dickens: The Pilgrim Edition Volume 7: 1853-1855 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 288.

² Kate Watson, “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle: British, American, and Australian Women’s Criminographic Narratives, 1860-1880,” (PhD diss., Cardiff University, 2010), 33-34.