Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 99

The Case of Anne Perry

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Rathbone, and indeed everyone else in the story, Hester is not blinded by
conventional expectations o f w om en’s nature and w om en’s professional
capabilities—thus it is only she, occupying a liminal space which allows her to
comprehend a woman’s possession of supposedly masculine qualities, who can
solve the mystery and understand its implications.
Perry emphasizes Hester’s identification with masculinity, and reinforces her
liminality, by having Hester define herself in “soldierlike” terms (Defend 250).
Throughout the series, Hester functions as a repository of war memories: at least
once in every novel (in a gesture parallel to Perry’s own attempts to write women
back into a history from which the 䁡