She has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh, in which she analysed Sherlock Holmes and unfinished Victorian serial novels, comparing the treatment of the ostensibly finished Holmes texts with that of texts in which authors had died before completing them. The primary focus was on completions of and speculations about Charles Dickens' unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Her primary research areas have been authorship, reading and serial publication in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, but she has also written an annotated bibliography on Sherlock Holmes, and worked on science fiction, power, adaptation and transformative works, and contemporary British parodic literature.