Nancy Drew Revisited: Female Private Eyes in Contemporary American Fiction

• Main Author: Isabelle Roblin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherche "Texte et Critique de Texte" 2004-10-01
• Series: Sillages Critiques
• Subjects: children literature; contemporary American detective fiction; feminism; Nancy Drew; sexuality
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/1456

Created in the 1930s by the Stratemeyer Syndicate of writers, the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories are still very popular today both with teenage girls and American female detective writers. What are the reasons for the enduring appeal of the girl detective? Is Nancy Drew really, as some women writers assert, the literary mother of the new breed of adult fictional women sleuths in the United States? What are the differences and the similarities between Nancy Drew and those fictional sleuths? Why do so many contemporary American female detective writers still somehow, consciously or not, take Nancy Drew as a model for their own fictional private eyes? Those are some of the mysteries this article is going to try and solve.