The Sorceress of the Strand was written by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace and appeared in The Strand Magazine (Oct 1902-Mar 1903). “L.T. Meade” was the pseudonym of Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith (1844-1914) and “Robert Eustace,” the pseudonym of Eustace Robert Barton (1854-1943). Smith is forgotten today, but in her time she was an important writers of detective fiction and one of the earliest and most prolific authors of girls’ school stories. Barton was a British doctor and mystery writer.

Madame Sara is one of the premier femmes fatale of the Victorian era. She is a beautifier and owns a popular shop in London from which she helps her clients, whether through simple cosmetics or through dentistry or surgery. She has traveled around the world and uses the knowledge she learned in South America to help her clients. She is popular with Society and moves in the best circles.

She is also a poisoner, adventuress, and murderer, beautiful and deadly. Unlike Madame Koluchy (see: The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings), Madame Sara has no political aims. She is simply interested in making as much money as she can, and toward that end commits murders a woman by putting poison in the filling of her tooth, blackmails a bride in an attempt to get an invaluable pearl necklace, and helps a man murder and fake a haunting to get access to a lode of gold.

The Madame Sara stories are one of the best examples in late-Victorian mystery fiction of the identification of the New Woman with evil. Meade is not usually counted as a conservative writer, and her Florence Cusack Mysteries have a New Woman protagonist, but the Madame Sara stories take the opposite approach to the New Woman, down to the protagonist’s name: Meade’s contemporary readers would instantly have understood that a character named “Madame Sara” was a reference to the New Woman writer Sarah Grand (1854-1943), who began calling herself “Madame Sarah Grand” in 1893. Meade’s Madame Sara embodies the four threats that the New Woman was supposed to pose to England. She is an occult threat, apparently immortal, less haughty but no less dangerous than Haggard’s Ayesha (see: She). Madame Sara is a financial threat; she is an independently successful businesswoman who became so without the help or support of a man. Madame Sara is sexually independent and has no interest in marriage. And Madame Sara is a criminal who displays an ingenious ruthlessness that male criminals were supposedly not capable of.

Each of these features are symbolic of societal fears about the New Woman. The figure of the New Woman went against the Victorians’ cultural and religious assumptions and struck them as not merely threatening but almost sinister, a modern version of the witch of folklore. It is no coincidence that the Fatal Woman replaced the Fatal Man in supernatural folklore in the second half of the nineteenth century. The New Woman’s financial independence was frightening to Victorian males, since a woman who was not dependent on men for money was no longer under their control and, it was thought, become so focused on her career that she would lose interest in marriage. Similarly, sexually independent women who showed no desire to marry and remained single into their thirties were thought to be one of the main causes of the declining birth rates in England (see: Fin-de-Siècle Unease). Madame Sara adds to this cultural fear with her behavior toward her friends, protégées, and victims, who are most usually attractive young women. These women adore Madame Sara (until she turns on them), and their relationship with Madame Sara hints at the “passionate friendships” of Victorian women, which could (and sometimes/often did) become lesbian relationships. Victorian men, whether they were aware of the existence of lesbians or not, were aware of (and afraid of) young women falling under the sway of a powerful, independent woman—a woman, moreover, who, like Madame Koluchy, represented an unwelcome foreign element inside Britain itself:

Beyond confounding Druce and Vandeleur, Sara's position as unknowable other, a nexus of outsider race and gender, resonates with the fin-de-siècle anxieties about degenerate beings poised to penetrate and contaminate British society, a fear which provoked a tightening of police authority and the further codification of racial and class hierarchies, both designed to protect the innocent English from the depredations of deviants. In Sara we find a criminal supremely foreign, whose alien immorality lies powerfully masked behind a perennially youthful face, blonde hair, and blue eyes, and who can easily infiltrate and topple British class and racial hierarchies. These stories engage in the same debate about the capacity for external beauty to hide internal deviance found in other texts of the period, such as The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Like these works, The Sorceress of the Strand portrays an individual who is able to engage in evil because she can mask her criminal tendencies, generated as they are by a deviant race and aberrant gender, behind a facade that is not only accepted but admired by society.¹

Meade pitches the gothic, primal, and foreign-coded chaos of her female antagonists against all of English modernity—communications technologies, railroad tables, Scotland Yard, professional networks, a patriarchal rational order—a battle in which neither side can claim a decisive victory.²

In Madame Sara Meade and Eustace write what is in essence a kind of detective story, but Meade and Eustace place the villainess, not the hero, at the forefront of the story, and moreover portray the forces of high society as conspiring with her rather than with the hero:

In Meade and Eustace's creation, we also find a character who defies the well entrenched conventions of nineteenth-century detective fiction. Unlike traditional detective stories, where the detective's foregone defeat of the criminal offers readers a narrative of social order and control, the Madame Sara stories provide a dystopic view of a society in which the aberrant criminal can be contained only provisionally.³

L. T. Meade’s detective series The Sorceress of the Strand depicts cosmetics, beauty, and feminine consumption as powerful detectors of the criminological gaze. Meade’s series is in many ways very much like Arthur Conan Doyle’s: it was published in the Strand Magazine with numerous illustrations, it follows Conan Doyle’s successful format of autonomous serialization, and it theorizes the relationship among femininity, visibility, and criminality. Both series explore what I argue is a central paradox of late-Victorian crime fiction: they depict women’s suddenly expanded visibility in the public sphere, via consumerism and first-wave feminism, but simultaneously emphasize the opaqueness and indecipherability of female criminality. The central difference between the two series is in Meade’s feminist perspective: she addresses pertinent feminist questions about gender, body, image, and visibility far more explicitly than Conan Doyle.⁴

Unfortunately, the prose of The Sorceress of the Strand is not the equal of Madame Sara, either as a character or a cultural symbol. The prose is stiff, the plots are over-extended, the protagonist Druce is wooden, and the plot developments are unimaginative and in some cases hard to credit. Meade created a fine villain in Madame Sara and then had her act just stupidly enough for Druce to defeat her. Meade makes Madame Sara half-Indian and half-Italian, thus reminding the reader of both the Yellow Peril threat and the Black Legend (see: Yellow Peril). And Meade relies too much on cliché, as in the haunted castle of “The Face of the Abbot,” a tired Gothic wheeze. (Madame Sara also has the commanding gaze of the Hero-Villain).

Print: L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace, The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2016.

¹ Jennifer A. Halloran, “The Ideology Behind The Sorceress of the Strand: Gender, Race, and Criminal Witchcraft,” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1914 45, no. 2 (2002): 178.

² Caroline Hovanec, “Bringing Back L.T. Meade,” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1914 61, no. 1 (2018): 143.

³ Halloran, “The Ideology Behind The Sorceress of the Strand,” 176.

⁴ Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 71.