![]() ![]() ![]() And yet, although we are asked to believe this is some great love affair, it is curiously bloodless. Wimsey has asked her to marry him at regular intervals, and she has just as regularly turned him down. This is five years after their first encounter in Strong Poison, and though Harriet has been absent from all but one of the intervening novels, the suggestion is that there has been a continuing but arms-length relationship throughout that period. The relationship between the two is curiously old-fashioned, even for the 1930s (the novel was published in 1935, and set in 1935). The least of them is actually taking place within the narrative: this is the love story of Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey. The central problem is that there are three love stories going on around this novel. But it is not, because she gets the balance wrong in the other direction, forgetting for large swathes of the novel that she is supposed to be telling a crime story. ![]() It should be one of the better novels, because at its heart is a social issue – specifically, women’s education more generally, the position of women in society – that was important to Sayers herself. Gaudy Night, which now completes my reading of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels, is the exception that proves the rule. Sayers’s mysteries were at their worst when they concentrated on the mechanics of the crime, and at their best when the crime was an incidental way of focussing upon some social or cultural issue. ![]()
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