'Owing to frequent acquaintance with peril, I had become unusually hardened for a woman.' Mrs Paschal, the heroine of Revelations of a Lady Detective, is regularly consulted by the police and serves as an undercover agent as well as investigating her own cases. But even though she is 'verging on 40', she throws herself into cases with verve and gusto and has no hesitation in infiltrating a deadly secret society or casting off her crinolines in order to plummet into a sewer on the trail of a criminal. Mrs Paschal is only the second ever professional female detective in a work of fiction. First published in 1864, these works are of historical significance because for over 20 years they remained the only books to feature a female detective as a protagonist.