InFocus: Dr Sara Lodge

In Conversation with Shortlisted Novelist Dr Sara Lodge

“I knew I wanted to be a writer from the time I was six,” said Dr Sara Lodge.

Dr Lodge, a member of the University of St Andrews faculty since 2002, was recently shortlisted for the 2025 Wolfson History Prize for her latest book, The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective. After discovering her passion for writing at an early age, Dr Lodge dove headfirst into the worlds of academia, speechwriting, and journalism, carving her own path in the creative writing industry in the process. From wedding speeches to screwball comedies, Dr Lodge’s pathway to critical acclaim has been anything but predictable. 

Reflecting on her earliest memories with writing, Dr Lodge said that it was the “thing [she] loved more than anything else.” 

“I was an only child and so I sort of grew up very much with books as friends [...] it is extraordinary how we can have friends across the centuries through books, so we need never be alone if we're readers,” Dr Lodge said in conversation with The Saint. 

In fact, it was this sense of companionship that inspired Dr Lodge to begin writing her own stories. 

“I really loved the way that writing could make people laugh. It kind of tickled them without ever touching them physically,” Dr Lodge said. “I wrote a story which I loved at the time because it made my teacher laugh. It was a story about these witches who were kind of comedy witches, and they got everything wrong, and they got into a dreadful mess. And, you know, it was kind of screwball comedy, which is still one of my favourite genres. And I thought, this is what I want. This is the thing that I want to do.” 

From there, Dr Lodge broadened her writing focus, venturing into the worlds of journalism and speechwriting, the latter of which, she claims, began entirely by accident.

“I was actually at somebody's wedding in America and a very good friend of mine, who's normally extraordinarily cheerful, was looking very gloomy,” Dr Lodge said. After enquiring what was wrong, she discovered that not only had her friend not yet prepared his speech, but that he was the best man. 

“We had about three hours to go, and I said, ‘Well, let's write your speech,’” Dr Lodge recalled. ‘It was actually the best fun either of us had ever had. The speech was a blast.” 

Dr Lodge quickly realised that her newfound skill could come in handy outside of the wedding industry: “I thought, maybe that's something I could actually do for money, because there are lots of people who are not very comfortable giving speeches.” 

It was during her postgraduate degree at the University of Oxford that Dr Lodge received a Quaker Fellowship to the United Nations, where she wrote speeches for former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, reflecting that she “started quite high up in a way.”

Even now, Dr Lodge continues to write speeches. “I care very passionately about green issues and the environment and women's rights and democracies,” she said. “So in a way, it's been really nice for me that, although I'm not a professor in any of those subjects, I haven't had to leave them behind. I can still engage with those topics on a daily basis.”

In fact, Dr Lodge has even managed to incorporate her speechwriting expertise into her career at the University. Speaking about her module, Speeches and Speechwriting: History, Theory and Practice, Dr Lodge said, “I like to think that I kind of brought speech writing back as a subject to St Andrews, where, of course, it was very important in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, but it had kind of fallen off the curriculum in the twentieth century.”

It is not just her knowledge of speechwriting that Dr Lodge shares with the University, however. A senior lecturer in the School of English, she currently teaches an Art of Victorian Poetry module, exploring visual art and its relationship with literature in the nineteenth century. On top of her loaded schedule, Dr Lodge shared that she is “thinking of doing a new course [...] which will be more on detectives.” 

This follows the release of her 2024 book, The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective. The book is a culmination of twelve years of writing and research, inspired by two novels housed in the British Library: The Female Detective and Revelations of a Lady Detective, both written in 1864 and considered to be some of the first representations of female detectives in literature.

When asked about the experience of researching for the book and the kinds of discoveries she made, Dr Lodge said that “the whole thing was quite a ride.”

Throughout her research, Dr Lodge discovered that “the police were actually employing women from the 1840s. The official narrative of police history is that women [didn’t] really join the force, certainly as police officers, until about 1918, and as police matrons until the 1890s. So this is a good 50 years where women are working for the police, where the police just don't really think about that history, and they don’t pay women properly. They didn't salary them, they didn't pension them.”

Dr Lodge commented on the need to bring this history to light: “I think given that the police are institutionally still rather misogynistic in this country. It's really important that that chapter of police history should be written back in, because these women were pretty brave, actually, and very hardworking.”

“There were all these active women with guns and whips and fisticuffs,” Dr Lodge continued. “And, you know, sensation drama’s just full of strong women roles, and yet we tend to still imagine women fainting in corsets in the [Victorian] era. We don't really think about that working-class tradition at all.” 

Upon learning that she had been shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, Dr Lodge recalled that her “jaw hit the floor.” Awarded by the Wolfson Foundation for over 50 years, the Prize is the United Kingdom’s most prestigious history award, recognising and celebrating books which “combine the highest quality of research with readability,” their website reads.

In regard to her spot on the shortlist, Dr Lodge remarked, “I don't really think of myself as a fully paid-up historian. I didn't study history at University; I exclusively studied English. So if I have become a historian, and maybe I have, it's sort of by accident. I think a lot of my career has kind of been semi-accidental, but I'm kind of okay with that.”

Though Dr Lodge considers herself to be an outlier in the group of six nominees, she professed that for her, even more valuable than winning is the opportunity to meet her fellow nominees. 

“I've been listening [...] to Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough on the radio for years and thought, ‘Oh, she sounds great. I'd love to meet her,’ but now I [get to],” Dr Lodge said. “As nice as it would be to win a big monetary prize, actually, these relationships are worth more.”

When asked what her hope was for new readers picking up the book, she answered, “ I hope that people enjoy this book, that they won't find it dry, and that they'll get new ideas that will help them to think about the period differently.”

“There is this sort of lineage which goes, Edgar Allen Poe, and then Wilkie Collins, and [Charles] Dickens, and then Arthur Conan Doyle. And I love all of those authors,” she said. “But there are all these women, too, both writing and performing and being female detectives, and it's time we knew.”

Image provided by Dr Sara Lodge