Felicitas Mayer

Felicitas Mayer studied English language and literature as well as philosophy at the LMU. She then graduated with an MA in English literature, language and culture from Freie Universität Berlin before completing a traineeship in editing at Rowohlt Berlin Verlag. She is currently writing her doctoral dissertation as part of the research training group "Family Matters" in which she investigates the role of servant figures in British crime fiction.

The Servant’s Eye: The Other Side of the Family in English Crime Fiction, 1920s to 1960s

Butlers and maids, housekeepers and gardeners – it’s impossible to imagine 19th and 20th-century English crime fiction without the servant figures who are rarely at the centre of the plot, and yet indispensable to it. In my PhD project, I examine texts from the 1920s to the 1960s, a period when despite the sinking number of actual domestic servants, crime fiction returned again and again to the set-up of a crime amongst an English upper-middle class family and its servants.
Considering works by Agatha Christie, Daphne du Maurier, Margery Allingham, Marie Belloc Lowndes, T. S. Eliot and Georgette Heyer, I want to examine the narrative strategies offered by servant figures in texts which investigate, along with the crime, the very concept of family. For the crimes often concern questions of inheritance, parentage or marriage, so that in the course of the investigation, a family’s previous beliefs and self-conceptions must be reconsidered. To comprehend these negotiations, I argue that we need to turn to those figures who constitute the families’ boundaries: the servants whose ambivalent position and unique insight into familial life not only enables them to either stabilise or destabilise the familial order, but makes them narratively indispensable for texts which question what makes a family.