SOURCE: "The First Feminist Detective: Anna Katharine Green's Amelia Butterworth," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 25, No. 2, Fall, 1991, pp. 77-86.

In the following excerpt, Ross calls That Affair Next Door a feminist work, arguing that Green challenges conventional notions of female behavior through her portrayal of Amelia Butterworth.

Born in Brooklyn in 1846, educated at the Ripley Female Academy in Vermont, and resident of Buffalo, New York, all her adult life, Anna Katharine Green was one of the first American women to write detective fiction. She wrote thirty-five detective novels and four collections of short stories during a career that spanned forty-five years. Her phenomenally successful first novel The Leavenworth Case was published in 1878.

Admirers of her work included President Woodrow Wilson, who wrote in a personal letter that he was a voracious reader of detective fiction and that he had gotten "the most authentic thrill out of Anna...