I built the sea, not the boat you're in

[sovay]

I could have sworn I owned Mo Moulton's The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and Her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women (2019) and it is driving me up the wall that if so I can't find it, because I have been noodling on and off at the question of Sayers and queerness ever since discovering that she was published in the sole issue of The Quorum: A Magazine of Friendship (1920) and in the process of confirming the co-authorship of the original 1936 stage version of Busman's Honeymoon with Muriel St. Clare Byrne, I was presented with this gem from its pages:

Reading both Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon as the product of collaboration between DLS, Bar, and Muriel changes the texts. It's clear, for one thing, that Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane as characters are not just ego projections on DLS's part. They are also composite portraits, capturing the conversations she had with Muriel and Bar about relationships and love and work. In a sense, Muriel and Bar become alternate models for Harriet and Peter. There's Muriel, with her curly blond hair, her scattershot brilliance, and her moods; there is Bar, with her grounded intelligence, her dark-haired comeliness, and her ruby cabochon ring, exactly like the ring Peter gives Harriet in Busman's Honeymoon. Bar's students passed along a rumor that she'd been given the ring by a fiancé who had died in the war, but this is probably mixing two things up. Bar's brother, Graham, was killed leading his company into action in August 1918. It would be reasonable to imagine that the ring, meanwhile, was a gift from Muriel, a 'fiancé' who was invisible because of her sex, not her death.

"Bar" is Marjorie Barber, Byrne's life partner. Modeling an ideal het relationship at least partly on a successful queer one is a deeply appealing idea and I'd love to be able to see if it's supported by the rest of the biography, which doesn't seem to be in my possession. I can't have lent it to someone. I didn't think the pandemic had been so dreadful as to make books simply evaporate. [edit] And now the penny's dropped that the same author was responsible for the magnificent "On Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey: An Essay with Personal Interruptions" (2014), I'm really bitter.

[edit edit] I am beginning to think Marblehead these days is permanently overcast: "If we disagree, we'll fight it out like gentlemen. We won't stand for matrimonial blackmail."

Comments

[sovay]

I do think it's interesting that, when writing an Evil Lesbian Killer (TM), Sayers made sure she put a functional, apparently very happy lesbian couple in, even if it was in the past.

Yes. I really liked finding that out! I think their happiness puts them in a relatively small category of Sayers couples, too. (The others that come to mind are Charles and Mary, Freddy and Rachel, and Sylvia and Eiluned—especially once Harriet enters the picture, I think of Sayers as more often exploring the failure modes of romantic relationships than their successes. I am not engaged in an actual re-read of the series, however, and can be corrected with impunity.)

[edit] I just remembered there's another plausibly lesbian couple in The Five Red Herrings (1931):

"Miss Selby and Miss Cochran occupied adjacent cottages and were continually to be found taking tea in each other's living-rooms or bathing together on the sands at the Doon. Miss Selby was tall, dark, rather angular, rather handsome in an uncompromising kind of way and painted rather good, strong, angular and handsome figure-studies in oils. Miss Cochran was round, cheerful, humorous and grey-haired; she illustrated magazine stories in line and wash. Wimsey liked them both, because they had no nonsense about them, and they liked him for the same reason, and also because they found Bunter extremely amusing. Bunter was always distressed to see them cooking their own dinners and putting up their own curtains."

Predatory Mary Whittaker really begins to look like the outlier in this sample set. She should perhaps be classed more usefully with all the men in Sayers' novels who exploit women, from Dr. Penberthy to Philip Boyes to Frank Crutchley and undoubtedly some others I'm forgetting. I still don't like that Miss Climpson effectively ventriloquizes Sayers' own skepticism about the viability of female relationships as cited in the letter she wrote to Leonard Green when he invited her to submit to The Quorum, but (a) she did submit to The Quorum and so we have the poem "Veronica" (b) that skepticism does seem to have backed off with time. Or at least it generalized into her skepticism about the viability of egalitarian relationships irrespective of gender; those dead sea apples recur finally in Harriet's own assessment of her relationship with Philip.

[tree_and_leaf]

Predatory Mary Whittaker really begins to look like the outlier in this sample set. She should perhaps be classed more usefully with all the men in Sayers' novels who exploit women, from Dr. Penberthy to Philip Boyes to Frank Crutchley and undoubtedly some others I'm forgetting.

Yes, I think that's right - as is your conclusion. The "Dead Sea apples" is a reference I don't recognise, but it's a strong and significant one, and it seems to me significant that it ends up being applied to heterosexual failure, too.

[tree_and_leaf]

Oh Lord, I've just googled it, and it's a fruit of Sodom.

But of course - given its final transference to Philip and Harriet - Sayers probably knew that "sodomy" can also be applied, as a category, to sex between men and women.