Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 95

The Case of Anne Perry

87

calling both domestic and deferential. It was a practice, she argued, to be undertaken
by trained, educated women who were generally middle- and upper-class “ladies.”
Though Nightingale resisted the tendency, still others sought to recognize nurses
as professionals with the authority to exercise independent judgment and the
concomitant respect and status5. Perry’s Hester emerges at a time when all of these
visions of nursing are in tension: were nurses servants or gentry? Women earning
their own living or “ladies” responding to a higher calling? Illiterate, untrained
amateurs or educated, skilled professionals? The uncertain status of the nurse in
the 1850s merged the discourses of gender, class, and labor in a matrix of identities,
all of which are available, and strategically useful, to Perry’s Hester Latterly. Such
instability is also useful to Perry herself as a writer of feminist history-mystery.
She is not, of course, writing history, but rather a mixture of historical fiction with
the mystery genre; yet like historians of women, whose work has so fundamentally
changed our understanding of women’s roles past and present, Perry urges readers
to reimagine possibilities for female agency in the past—and hence provides
inspiration for women in the present day.
Like those of a number of the women recruited by Nightingale to nurse in the
Crimea, Hester’s origins are upper class; yet by the end of the first novel of Perry’s
Inspector Monk series, The Face o f a Stranger, her mutable class alliances are
apparent—and this mutability establishes itself as a crucial part of her role in Monk’s
success in solving his cases. Though Hester’s family has “no connection to any of
the great houses,” it is “well-bred...; in fact genteel enough to have aspirations, and
to have taught its daughters no useful arts” (137). But Hester wants desperately to
be useful, and thus is “among the first to leave England and sail...to the Crimea
and offer her help to Florence Nightingale in the troop hospital in Scutari,” where
she learns to nurse soldiers and their families, treating them—often independently—
for injury and disease (137). Hester returns home before the war’s end because her
parents have died, their deaths the result of a financial scandal. Her family’s reduced
circumstances, which render her in effect more middle than upper class (though
she is still considered a “well-bom” gentlewoman), fuel h