Ask the Chatbot Games & Quizzes History & Society Science & Tech Biographies Animals & Nature Geography & Travel Arts & Culture ProCon Money Videos
The Daughter of Time
Introduction References & Edit History Related Topics
Images
Josephine Tey
Britannica AI Icon
Adding us as a Preferred Source tells Google you trust our content, so our articles show up more often in your Google Search, Discover feed, and AI Overviews.
verifiedCite
While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
Select Citation Style
Feedback
Corrections? Updates? Omissions? Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login).
Thank you for your feedback

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

External Websites
Josephine Tey
Josephine Tey Josephine Tey, author of The Daughter of Time (1951), in 1934.

The Daughter of Time

novel by Tey
Written by
Therie Hendrey-Seabrook
Therie Hendrey-Seabrook's work appears in Encyclopaedia Britannica as part of a joint publishing agreement with the publisher of 501 Must-Read Books, where the work originally appeared. 
Therie Hendrey-Seabrook
Fact-checked by
Britannica Editors
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
Britannica Editors
History

The Daughter of Time, detective novel written by Scottish author Josephine Tey and published in 1951. The book, the fifth of six featuring Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant, is widely considered one of the best mystery novels of the 20th century and is the work for which Tey is best known.

In The Daughter of Time Tey presents an unusual perspective on the thriller genre. Inspector Grant is recovering in hospital from injuries sustained when he fell through a trapdoor while chasing a suspect, and he is mightily bored. Both nurses and his friend, the actress Marta Hallard, bring him novels to read, which fail to alleviate his boredom. Later Marta brings Grant, who believes he can divine character by observation of faces, a collection of portraits of historical figures for his amusement. Grant becomes particularly absorbed by a portrait of King Richard III, the English king whom history and Shakespeare have credited with the murder of his nephews, the little princes in the Tower of London. Richard’s portrait does not appear villainous to Grant, and he resolves to do what he calls some academic investigating.

Enlisting the aid of Marta and a young American researcher, Brent Carradine, to bring him such books and evidence as he needs, Grant becomes bent on uncovering the truth behind the historical incident, and he brings all his detective abilities to bear upon the mystery. Grant’s interpretation of his readings leads him to conclude that the young princes survived not just past 1483, the last time they were seen and the year they have been assumed to have been killed, but into the reign of King Henry VII, and that Henry had more motive and opportunity to have the young princes murdered.

Tey has given us a surprisingly gripping historical mystery. The methods of the detective and the historian are equally exacting and, unusually, this novel takes us not to the action itself but rather inside the detective’s thought processes as they occur and reveals the logic on which he develops his remarkable conclusions.

Therie Hendrey-Seabrook