Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 103

The Case of Anne Perry

95

While Hester’s access to working-class identity is more often employed in her
sleuthing duties, she occasionally profits from her “well-born” status as well. When
her upper-class friend Edith Sobell asks for her help in the matter of her brother
Thaddeus Carlyon’s murder, Hester gains access to the murdered man’s household
as a social equal. Monk, who is investigating the crime, recognizes how important
this is for him. Hester is an “excellent ally” in part because “she was bom of a
different social class, and so would perceive and interpret nuances he might easily
misunderstand” (96). And indeed, she does. Hester solves the case not from being
one of the servant class, but from being a guest in the Carlyons’ home. From this
position, she can observe the Carlyons and has some authority to press the servants
on important matters, on things that they have observed while being thought
invisible. Because she is on hand to socialize with the family, observing small
behavioral details, as well as to mediate between servants during a climactic and
telling argument, she discovers things that help her to crack the case, as only
someone in her position could do. Hester’s upper-class associations play a crucial
role, then, in her work as a collaborator with Monk, providing her with an insider
status that he could never achieve.
As a new kind of “lady” nurse who served in the Crimea, therefore, Hester
obtains a liminality upon which she frequently calls in her work as a sleuth. Perry
uses this device in order to converge her writing of women into history with her
writing of detective fiction. Along with recent historians of British women’s
experiences in nursing, Perry’s fictionalization of this history provides a space for
women in the past as passionate and important players in the embattled formation
o f the health-care professions. By placing her fictional character in precisely this
moment— immediately after the Crimean War, but before nursing was truly
recognized by many as a profession—Perry also provides the ideal setting for a
liminal detective-heroine who occupies the threshold between gender, class, and
professional identities. Asfeminist history-mystery, Perry’s novels are not, of course,
entirely unproblematic; though she clearly seems to valorize women’s entitlement
to self-determination and explicitly claims for them an active, even central, role in
British history, her books are driven nevertheless by a certain nostalgia for the
same culture she often criticizes, as Leaker and Taddeo note9. Nevertheless, Perry’s
portrait of Hester Latterly participates in a campaign that is central to much feminist
discourse of the past few decades, namely the attempt to show that categories of
identity imagined to be diametrically opposed or even unrelated are in fact mutually
defining and interdependent, and that they are constructed rather than natural.
Hester’s liminality both depends upon and seeks to illustrate the ways in which, in
1850s England, class, gender, and professional identities were intertwined, showing
specifically that the debate over professionalization for women nurses invoked
and challenged rigid definitions of gender and class. With characteristic aplomb,