Ruth The Betrayer Or The Female Spy Valancourt Classics

One of the most thrilling of Victorian penny dreadfuls and possibly the first novel to feature a female detective, Ruth the Betrayer returns to print for the first time in over 150 years Ruth Trail leads a double life, working as a spy or informant for the London police while secretly executing her own black deeds of theft and murder. Over the course of the unflagging, action-packed 1100-page plot, we follow Ruth's criminal career as she uses her wits and beauty to gain wealth and power. Along the way, as we pass through the horrors of prisons, convents, and the criminal underworld, we meet a cast of memorable characters, including the murderous ruffian Death's Head, escaped convict Jack Rafferty, the sinister schemer Eneas Earthworm and his victim Alice Trevellyan, wrongly accused as a murderess, the bumbling but charming Captain Charley Crockford, and the unlucky Cadbury Kid. Originally published in weekly installments in 1862-63, Ruth the Betrayer; or, The Female Spy returns to print at last in this new edition, which includes an introduction and annotations by Dagni A. Bredesen, all 51 illustrations from the original edition, and an appendix featuring additional contextual material.

A research guide for specialists in the Gothic novel, the Romantic movement, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, and popular culture, this work contains summaries of more than two hundred novels, reputed to be Gothic, published in English between 1790 and 1830. Also included are indexes of titles and characters and an extensive index of characteristic objects, motifs, and themes that recur in the novels -- such as corpses, bloody and otherwise, dungeons, secret passageways, filicide, fratricide, infanticide, matricide, patricide, and suicide. The novels described, including those by such writers as Charlotte Dacre, Louisa Sidney Stanhope, Regina Maria Roche, Charles Maturin, and Mary Shelley, are for the most part out of print and circulation and are unavailable except in rare book rooms. Thus this book provides the researcher with ready access to information that would otherwise be difficult to obtain.

First published in 2012. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

""It's a big thing,"" said Loveday Brooke, addressing Ebenezer Dyer, chief of the well-known detective agency in Lynch Court, Fleet Street; ""Lady Cathrow has lost £30,000 worth of jewellery, if the newspaper accounts are to be trusted."" ""They are fairly accurate this time. The robbery differs in few respects from the usual run of country-house robberies. The time chosen, of course, was the dinner-hour, when the family and guests were at table and the servants not on duty were amusing themselves in their own quarters. The fact of its being Christmas Eve would also of necessity add to the business and consequent distraction of the household. The entry to the house, however, in this case was not effected in the usual manner by a ladder to the dressing-room window, but through the window of a room on the ground floor - a small room with one window and two doors, one of which opens into the hall, and the other into a passage that leads by the back stairs to the bedroom floor....""