skygiants: Utena huddled up in the elevator next to a white dress; text 'they made you a dress of fire' (pretty pretty prince(ss))
skygiants ([personal profile] skygiants) wrote 2021-08-01 05:10 pm (UTC)

I think you're right that middle-aged women outrank in golden-age detective novels, but I'd actually argue that twentieth-century Gothics (as distinct to murder mysteries) tend to have a lot of focus on teen-girls-as-people -- in large part because the protagonist is often a teenage or twentysomething girl, and if there's also a dead teenage or twentysomething girl involved, there's an element of identification/doubling with the present (for ex. Michaels' Ammie Come Home, in which a contemporary teen is haunted by the ghost of a dead one; Marilyn Ross' extremely bad The Locked Corridor, in which the heroine is attempting to solve her identical twin sister's murder; and, of course, Stewart's The Ivy Tree, in which doubling doubling spoilers.)

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