Abstract:
This thesis examines Death of a Ghost (1934), Flowers for the Judge (1935), Dancers in
Mourning (1937), and The Fashion in Shrouds (1938), a group of detective novels by Margery Allingham
that are differentiated from her other work by their generic hybridity.
The thesis argues that the hybrid nature of this group of Campion novels enabled a highly
skilled and insightful writer such as Allingham to negotiate the contradictory notions about the place of
women that characterized the 1930s, and that in dOing so, she revealed the potential of one of the most
popular and accessible genres, the detective novel of manners, to engage its readers in a serious
cultural dialogue. The thesis also suggests that there is a connection between Allingham's exploration of
modernity and femininity within these four novels and her personal circumstances.
This argument is predicated upon the assumption that during the interwar period in England
several social and cultural attitudes converged to challenge long-held beliefs about gender roles and
class structure; that the real impact of this convergence was felt during the 1930s by the generation that
had come of age in the previous decade-Margery Allingham's generation; and that that generation's
ambivalence and confusion were reflected in the popular fiction of the decade. These attitudes were
those of twentieth-century modernity--contradiction, discontinuity, fragmentation, contingency-and in
the context of this study they are incorporated in a literary hybrid. Allingham uses this combination of
the classical detective story and the novel of manners to examine the notion of femininity by juxtaposing
the narrative of a longstanding patriarchal and hierarchical culture, embodied in the image of the Angel
in the House, with that of the relatively recent rights and freedoms represented by the New Woman of
the late nineteenth-century.
Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social difference forms the theoretical foundation of the thesis's
argument that through these conflicting narratives, as well as through the lives of her female characters,
Allingham questioned the Hsocial myth" of the time, a prevailing view that, since the First World War,
attitudes toward the appropriate role and sphere of women had changed.
