*The Franchise Affair* is definitely best avoided. But the "women's colleges turn women into twisted homicidal maniacs" subtext cited by the skygiants post's first dis-recommender of *Miss Pym Disposes* would never have occurred to me. (Interestingly, Dorothy L. Sayers brings up this very stereotype in *Gaudy Night*, only to debunk it in what struck me as an almost equally problematical way.) Admittedly, there were definitely a few problematical elements in *Pym*, like some of the students' habit of jokingly referring to their (charming and not particularly slutty even by 1940's standards) Brazilian classmate as "the Nut Tart."
(WARNING: Everything from here on is probably a bit spoilerish.)
But I just wrote off the person eventually revealed to be the murderer as a natural-born sociopath whose sociopathology required little or no assistance from the allegedly hothouse atmosphere of a women's college. Although if I'm remembering the plot properly, her ostensible motive was more "feminine" (in terms of not directly benefiting her in the expected way) than those of similarly ruthless male characters, or even the child murderer in the movie version of "The Bad Seed," which I think was made not much later--or at least sometime in the 1950's. Of course, the last time I read *Miss Pym Disposes* was at least twenty-five years ago, so it's possible that I'd interpret it quite differently now.
no subject
(WARNING: Everything from here on is probably a bit spoilerish.)
But I just wrote off the person eventually revealed to be the murderer as a natural-born sociopath whose sociopathology required little or no assistance from the allegedly hothouse atmosphere of a women's college. Although if I'm remembering the plot properly, her ostensible motive was more "feminine" (in terms of not directly benefiting her in the expected way) than those of similarly ruthless male characters, or even the child murderer in the movie version of "The Bad Seed," which I think was made not much later--or at least sometime in the 1950's. Of course, the last time I read *Miss Pym Disposes* was at least twenty-five years ago, so it's possible that I'd interpret it quite differently now.