by Florence Marryat
edited by Greta Depledge
First published as a novel in 1876, Her Father’s Name is the sensational story of Leona Lacoste, a pistol-toting young woman who embarks upon a quest to clear the name of her late father. The compelling plot combines murder, mystery, cross-dressing, illegitimacy, amateur sleuthing, and hysteria.
A contemporary reviewer remarked:
She is everything by turns and nothing long. She dresses as a boy, and is never recognised; plays many parts, totally beyond the power of ordinary mortals, and is always successful.
This new edition, edited by Dr Greta Depledge, features an introduction, contextual notes and additional material, including:
- The life and work of Florence Marryat
- Cross-dressing, detection and hysteria
- Female cross-dressing in nineteenth-century literature
- The female detective and Her Father’s Name
- The nineteenth-century hysteric
- Extract from Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda
- Extract from Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins
- Contemporary reviews of Her Father’s Name
Greta Depledge is a lecturer at the Faculty of Lifelong Learning, Birkbeck College and an associate lecturer for the Open University. She specialises in the interface between medicine and literature in the nineteenth century and is co-editor of The Female Body in Medicine and Literature for Liverpool University Press (2011). Greta also works on Florence Marryat and nineteenth and twentieth-century crime fiction.
Victorian Secrets also publishes The Dead Man’s Message and The Blood of the Vampire.