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

[legionseagle]

At this point, and apologies to tree_and_leaf who has probably heard this one from me several times already, I have the oblg! rant about the Established Church, consequential interference of the Houses of Parliament in prayer book reform (see here .) That is, Laura Ingalls Wilder might have had her problems like bears, scarlet fever, locusts and being a racist git edited by a libertarian racist git, but at least she didn't have to contend with the Houses of Parliament. Which meant that whenever the Church had got round to deciding that yes, actually, "obey" was a bit anachronistic*, the whole might of the Rural Members would rise up and either argue that it was going to led to self-flagellation before statues of the Virgin Mary erected in St Paul's or that it would end up giving handles to the Non-Conformists. Hence the Prayer Book never got itself reformed, and priests offering the bride the option were technically out of line.


*My objection to "obey" isn't just that but that the whole might of the Law of England was for half a millennium hell-bent on enforcing a woman's marriage oath with the full weight of its power, up to and including forcing her to have sex with a husband knowingly infected with active communicable syphilis, whereas the same legal might was equally hell-bent on removing any splinter of truth from the husband's promise to "endow" and protecting his property against the wife's claims come what may.

[ethelmay]

That's fascinating. I had assumed Helen Wimsey's surprise at Harriet saying "obey" implied that people in Helen's circles mostly didn't by then. But perhaps she just thought of Harriet as being the sort of person who wouldn't, and would have gotten in a dig at her either way - rather like someone in the hippie era being faux-astonished that a young woman wore a bra and shaved her legs for her wedding day.

[legionseagle]

Talking about Helen's circles, there was an absolutely idiotic fuss that Kate Middleton didn't, only ten years ago (it seems from the attached that Diana didn't in 1981, either, but it's interesting that it was still newsworthy in 2011.)

Now you mention it, it sounds exactly what you suggest. The bit Helen is genuinely squeamish about in the traditional prayer book is the stuff which is more 17th century frank than early 20th century prudish about sex. I think the "obey" business is her having a go at Harriet.