Cross-Dressing in the City: Olive Malvery's the Speculator

Abstract

Despite a growing body of scholarship on finance and fiction, Malvery's The Speculator has not yet received the critical attention it deserves. In this article, I undertake the first detailed analysis of Malvery's fictional foray into the world of finance, centred on the story of a female stockbroker operating in disguise in the City of London. The first section of the article focuses on late nineteenth-century and early Edwardian novels of finance, chiefly concerned with deploring the cunning ruses of company promoters, and provides a brief overview of their representations of the 'popular investor'. I then analyse how the cross-dressing masquerade is orchestrated and tested in The Speculator, culminating in a scene of violence that takes place at the Stock Exchange and exposes the threat of physical force underpinning discriminatory regulation. The final section argues that the swerve towards the spy thriller, a popular genre in Edwardian England, allows Malvery to contain and disperse the fear of violence, the crude underside of the cross-dressing act, and to go on envisioning for her intrepid heroine ever more incredible adventures with geopolitical implications. By attending closely to the novel's hybrid formal structure, my reading suggests that a good deal of fictionalizing was necessary to imagine the protagonism of women in the money market, at a time when their role as investors was no longer exceptional, but their inclusion into the circle of active financial players was still a matter of dispute.