William Stephens Hayward

Tales of Life, Love, & Adventure

Love's Treason; Or, The Two Privateers. (The Vendetta and the Avenger.).

The Man at the Wheel; Or, Yarn Spinning

Ran away from home

Michael Ashley

In nineteenth-century London, middle-class women did not engage in what were seen as "unladylike activities." There were many jobs that a woman simply could not be expected to do because they were viewed as unsuitable for finer female sensibilities. The idea of a woman being involved in the murkiness of criminal detection must have seemed a radical and adventurous one in Victorian times: women simply did not do that sort of thing. And yet, in 1864, to the delight of men and women alike, two male authors published novels starring a female detective. William Stephens Hayward published Revelations of a Lady Detective just six months after Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective (republished by the British Library in 2012), making Hayward's the second novel ever published to feature a female detective. Hayward's heroine, Mrs. Paschal, is a very different character from her predecessor, Forrester's G. For a start, Mrs. Paschal is shown smoking on the front cover--an activity considered very modern and daring for women, even in the late nineteenth century. She is a widow, left close to financial ruin by the death of her husband, and supports herself through her detective work. This much racier female detective is however equally inventive, intuitive, and insightful, and with a Colt revolver in hand she works her way through a variety of cases involving theft, murder, and kidnapping. This very rare novel will be welcomed by all fans of Victorian crime fiction.

Revelations of a Lady Detective

"Science fiction/fantastic novel involving balloon travel across the Pacific and USA. Lands at one stage in Australia ... Includes brief description of how hero learnt the natives' language and his wandering around Sydney before flying to San Francisco" -- Bookseller's catalogue.

William Stephens Hayward

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