Here's an article looking at her outlook:
Two central protagonists recur in James’s fiction: Adam Dalgliesh, a professional Inspector, and Cordelia Gray, a private working-class investigator. Because Cordelia Gray only appears in two novels: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972); and The Skull beneath the Skin (1982); James is not often credited with the writing of the first modern novel to feature a female detective. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman combines the characterisation of the hard-boiled novel with the structure of the bildungsroman. Like the protagonists in the stories by Hammett, Chandler and Spillane, Cordelia is estranged from society and her role as a detective is often contested. Contrary to what characterised the hard-boiled genre, however, such repeated challenges derive uniquely from Cordelia’s gender, as the title underlines. This is apparent from the very start of the novel when Cordelia’s partner commits suicide, leaving her the unique proprietor of Pryde’s Detective Agency. The policeman who first questions her about Bernie Pryde’s death takes it for granted that she was simply his secretary. Female characters are equally sceptic about Cordelia’s chances to succeed in her job. When she breaks the news of the suicide to the owner of the pub where she used to go with Bernie, the landlady comments: 'You’ll be looking for a new job, I suppose? After all, you can hardly keep the Agency going on your own. It isn’t a suitable job for a woman ... I shouldn’t think your mother would approve of you staying on alone'. Thus, her achievements celebrate her development into a professional detective from the amateur status she has at the beginning of the novel. After such a determined start, feminist critics were disappointed to see Cordelia Gray dropped for 10 years and revived only in The Skull Beneath the Skin, where she appears inept and unsuitable for her job. At the end of this second novel, Cordelia is hired to find a lost Siamese kitten: '... she had a job waiting for her ... she didn’t despise its simplicities; almost she welcomed them. Animals didn’t torment themselves with the fear of death, or torment you with the fear of their dying. They didn’t burden you with their psychological problems ... They didn’t try to murder you'. Such conclusion seems indeed to state that investigating murders is an unsuitable job for a woman. In her essay 'Gray Areas: P. D. James’s Unsuiting of Cordelia', Nicola Nixon has claimed that James’s belittling of Cordelia is the result of the author’s own distancing from feminism.
Contrary to Cordelia, the widower Adam Dalgliesh rises ever-higher in his career through the novels, attaining the status of Commander and even of published poet. In spite of his clever intuitions, Dalgliesh is fully conscious of his fallibility and James is careful not to romanticise the figure of the detective. 'Detectives', she argues, 'are far less creatures of fantasy or romantic wish-fulfilment. They tend to be professionals doing a difficult job in a modern world.' While Dalgliesh is a liberal agnostic, P. D. James has made no secret of her Christian and conservative views which have grown stronger with the years and which, some critics claim, put her out of touch with the contemporary society she is so eager to portray. In his review of The Murder Room, Mark Lawson has pointed out that 'when reading James, you do find yourself nostalgic for crack cocaine, anal sex and people calling each other "mutha"'. It has also been noted that, while James usually refrains from mentioning contemporary controversial events, when she does so (as with the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in Death In Holy Orders), it is to impose a conservative moral on them. Yet, masked under P. D. James’s genteel settings and dialogues, her novels explore the darker and disturbing instincts of the human mind with a complexity that defies political partisanship. James conforms to the definition of her homonym Henry that the purpose of a novel should be 'To help the human heart to know itself'. However, to her, such knowledge entails the disturbing admission that the human heart regards murder with fascination.
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth193
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