Eleanor's Victory (1863) was one of the first novels to include a female detective as a leading character, although there had already been some sporadic examples in Catherine Crowe's Susan Hopley (1841), Wilkie Collins's short story ‘The Story of Anne Rodway’ (1856) and in The Revelations of a Lady Detective (1861) by W. S. Hayward. In just a few years female investigators became the narrative norm, whose success lay in ‘novelty, dramatic effect’, in their ‘unorthodox method of detecting’ and ‘because noisiness – a fundamental requirement of the detective – [was] considered a feminine trait’. However, while in the abovementioned cases the activity of the detective represented an escape from the monotony of domestic life, in Braddon's Eleanor Vane (the main character in Eleanor's Victory) her investigation is motivated by a stubborn search for truth, vengeance and justice. Braddon's novel opens in August 1853, when fifteen-year-old Eleanor Vane arrives in Paris to live with her old father George, a decadent aristocrat who has squandered his money on gambling. In order to pay Eleanor's college fees George Vane decides to play his last game at cards with two mysterious characters. However, the loss of the card game drives him to suicide. He leaves only a torn and partially readable note, in which he accuses the two card players of having cheated. The day after, George Vane's body is found in the morgue by Richard Thornton, a young painter of theatrical backdrops, who convinces Eleanor to go back to London and to live with him and his aunt Eliza Piccirillo.