which she has been, until recently, best known.484 Her best-known work was the
abolitionist dime novel, Maum Guinea and Her Plantation “Children.” or. Holidav-
week on a Louisiana Estate: A Slave Romance (1861) 485
Press, 1975, pp. 734-5.) Victor’s first novel appeared when she was aged fifteen: The Last Days o f Tul: a Romance o f the Lost Cities o f the Yucatan (1846).
482 Victor was also the editor o f Home: A Monthly for the W ife, the Mother, the Sister and the Daughter from January 1859 (published by Beadle and Adams). This associates her with her British contemporaries: for example Braddon’s editing o f Temple Bar (up to 1866) and afterwards Belgravia: A London Magazine (from 1866), and W ood’s editorship o f the Argosv (1867-87).
483 Her name changed after marriage from Metta Victoria Fuller to ‘Metta Victoria Fuller V ictor.’ Wirt Sikes has written that this change was ‘decidedly regal’. (Wirt Sikes, ‘Talked About People: Metta Victoria Victor’, Saturday Journal (25 June, 1881), p. 2) Victor also had many pseudonyms, as well as being proficient in many genres. Albert Johannsen records the pseudonyms ‘Corinne Cushman’, ‘Eleanor Lee Edwards’, and ‘Rose Kennedy’ (Johannsen, The House o f Beadle and Adams. II. 280.). Okuda notes that ‘she used the pseudonym Mark Peabody for her humorous stories’ (Okuda, ‘Metta Victoria’, p. 36)). Max J. Herzberg states: ‘Oddly enough, she wrote under her own name for the New York W eekly and for Saturday Night, but her contributions to B eadle’s magazines and libraries appeared under various pen names’ (Max J. Herzberg and the Staff o f the Thomas Y. Crowell Company, ‘Victor, Metta Victoria [Fuller]’, The Reader’s Encyclopedia o f American Literature (New York: Crowell, 1962), p. 1180.) Michele Slung, in her introduction to the 1979 edition o f The Dead Letter, adds that bar the pseudonym ‘Seeley Regester’, all V ictor’s other pseudonyms ‘can be identified by se x .’ (M ichele Slung, ‘Introduction’, Seeley Regester The Dead Letter (Boston: Gregg, 1979), v-ix (p. ix) The ‘American W omen’s Dime N ovel Project’ adds ‘Walter T. Gray’, ‘Mrs. Orrin James’, ‘Louis LeGrand’, ‘The Singing Sybil’ and ‘Mrs. Henry Thom as’ to the list.
(http://chnm.gmu.edu/dimenovels/authors/victor.html)
484 Victor’s The Senator’s Son, or The Maine Law: a Last Refuge: A Story Dedicated to the Law- Makers (1853) dealt with prohibition laws. Willard and Livermore say that this book sold over 30,000 copies in England but that Victor did not receive any o f the m oney from this. (A Woman o f the Century, p. 735.) Copyright between Britain and America w as a contentious issue and enabled the proliferation o f piracy— this will be seen again in V ictor’s The Dead Letter. Victor’s second novel, Fashionable Dissipation (New York: United States B ook Co., 1853), was a temperance novel dealing with alcoholism and male/female relations. Victor’s third novel, Mormon Wives: A Narrative o f Facts Stranger Than Fiction (1856), addressed polygamy in Utah; Passing the Portal: or. A Girl’s Struggle. An Autobiography (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1876) also examined gender relations.
485 (N ew York: Beadle and Co., 1861). Albert Johannsen notes that this was Victor’s most successful commercial venture, selling over 100,000 copies in America. (Albert Johannsen, The House o f Beadle and Adams and its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Storv o f a Vanished Literature 3 vols. (Norman: University o f Oklahoma Press, 1950-62), I. 40) Victor wrote a number o f dime novels, o f which the first was A lice Wilde: The Raftsman’s Daughter (1860). This was followed by more dime novels by Victor in varying genres: Uncle Ezekiel and his Exploits on Two Continents (1861), The Gold Hunters
More important to this thesis is Victor’s production of three tales featuring
detectives: The Dead Letter: An American Romance (1866-7), The Figure Eight: or.
The Mystery of Meredith Place (The Illuminated Western World. 1869), and the short
story ‘The Skeleton at the Banquet’ (1867).486 These were published under the
A Q H
pseudonym ‘Seeley Regester.’
The anonymously authored Too True: A Story of
To-Day (Putnam’s Monthly Magazine. 1868) was also written by Victor, and it
featured two amateur detectives.488 While The Figure Eight. ‘The Skeleton at the
Banquet’, and Too True are of interest, they will not be discussed here; most
significant in the context of this thesis is Victor’s The Dead Letter.489
(1863), The Backwood’s Bride: A Romance o f Squatter Life (1860), and Jo D aviess’ Client: or ‘Courting’ in Kentucky (1863). The figure o f Susan Carter in The Backw ood’s Bride performs a quasi detecting function which is not wholly unlike the female avenger/’detective’ in Britain.
486 Akiyo Okuda is the only critic who mentions ‘The Skeleton at the Banquet’ as written under the pseudonym o f ‘Seeley Regester’ (as well as The Dead Letter and The Figure Eight). In her article she does not give this story a specific date, yet writes in her bibliography: “ The Skeleton at the Banquet.’ Stories and Sketches bv our Best Authors. Boston: Lee, 1867, 9 -3 3 .’ She precis’s the story: ‘This Poesque story where a physician narrator encounters a man who believes his younger sister to be deranged, and who turns out to be the one who is going insane, is quite suspenseful. Victor seems to be distinguishing these mystery-orientated writings from other writings.’ (Akiyo Okuda, ‘Metta Victoria Fuller Victor’s The Dead Letter (1864) and the Rise o f Detecting Culture/Detective Fiction’, Clues: A Journal o f Detection 19.2 (1998), 35-57 (p. 36)) ‘Dora Elmyr’s Worst Enemy; or, Guilty or Not Guilty’ (1878) is also represented as a crime-related text, which was published the same year as The
Leavenworth Case. In the same year, however, Alcott wrote the similarly titled story, The Skeleton in the Closet (Boston: Elliott, Thornes & Talbot [1867] as No. 49 in the Ten Cent N ovelettes o f Standard American Authors series).
487 Critics switch between either Victor or her pseudonym, ‘Regester’. I w ill be using Victor.
488 These are a student, Robbie Cameron, and artist, M iss Bayles. Kathleen L. Maio recognizes that this story ‘features a good deal o f detection by a woman artist’ (Kathleen L. Maio, ‘Metta Victoria Fuller Victor’, in American Women Writers: A Critical Guide from Colonial Tim es to the Present, ed. Lina Mainiero (New York: Ungar, 1982), Volume 4, 302-4 (p. 303)). Lucy Sussex draws a comparison with Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Case; she writes that ‘Fuller V ictor’s detective novel Too True (1868) was also published by Putnam, but anonymously. Green differed in not being an isolated instance for the publisher, but rather a recognised, respectable “brand” name.’ (Sussex, ‘The Art o f Murder and Fine Furniture: The Aesthetic Projects o f Anna Katharine Green and Charles Rohlfs’, in Formal Investigations: Aesthetic Style in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Detective Fiction, ed. Paul Fox and Koray Melikoglu (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2007), 159-78 (p. 176)). In this thesis I will focus on The Dead Letter, which was Victor’s first and strongest foray into crime fiction.
489 In critical work there has been an oscillation between the spellings o f ‘M eta’ or ‘Metta’, and ‘Regester’ or ‘Register.’ Kathleen Gregory Klein uses ‘M eta’ and ‘Regester’ (see Klein, ‘Introduction’, in Great Women Mystery Writers Classic to Contemporary, ed. Kathleen Gregory Klein (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1994), 1-9), yet Sussex, The Aunt Lute Anthology, and Panek all use ‘Register’ (see Lucy Sussex and John Burrows ‘Whodunit?: Literary Forensics and the Crime Writing o f James Skipp Borlase and Mary Fortune’, BSA N Z Bulletin 21.2 (1997), 73-106). Okuda has ‘Regester’ and Panek ‘Metta’ (see ‘Metta Victoria Fuller Victor’s The Dead Letter’, in Clues). The