Nineteenth-Century Female Crime Writers and the Marriage Debate

Activity: Talk or presentation typesPresentation

Description

This paper considers how female crime writers in the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire reflected and interrogated issues related to women’s rights within marriage. It will discuss Kapitolina Nazar’eva’s fascinating 1879 narrative ‘Специалист’, first published in Вестник Европы, which gives a first-person female account of attempts to secure a divorce from the consistory court. I will then examine how this work informs later works of female-authored crime fiction and their depiction of marriage. Reference will be made to Nazar’eva’s Мститель (1894) and Liudmila Simonova’s 1883 novel Убила in which the use of narrative mirroring effectively conveys a sense of the ubiquity and inescapability of violence within marriage.
Period20 Nov 202523 Nov 2025
Held atAssociation for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, United States
Degree of RecognitionInternational