and the detective referring to the main suspect as "The Dago" for most of the book
I read a later edition in which all instances of "dago" were replaced with "Levantine" and guess what? It doesn't help!
The smart sympathetic character suddenly swooning and saying "ooh, yes darling, forbid me to have a career" really comes out of the blue -- well, she'd mentioned a couple of times that she found it wearing to feel responsible for everything at work, but I think I posted somewhere that the situation would have been better resolved with intermittent recreational BDSM rather than giving up one's day job.
You did!
I discovered last night while reading some biographical material about Allingham that she wrote The Fashion in Shrouds while almost having an extramarital affair with a man to whom she was passionately, unnervingly sexually attracted; in the end she didn't, but it required a conscious decision, and making it seems to have given her a lot of trouble. The author quoted a letter detailing Allingham's belief that sexual and artistic passion were merely different expressions of the same creative energy, meaning she actively worried that if she gave her spare time and attention to another partner, she wouldn't have anything left over for her work. Her resources were genuinely low at the time; she was under a lot of emotional strain and her health kept crashing. She broke the relationship off and finished the book. So with this information in mind it looks to me like Allingham gave Val her dilemma, but decided for the character in the opposite direction than she did for herself. I feel much more comfortable viewing the ending of Shrouds as a fictional road not taken, maybe even an exploration of wish-fulfillment, the hot guy rather than the hard work. The problem remains that (a) the statement "femininity unpossessed is a femininity unprotected from itself, a weakness and not a charm" is too much of a generalization to sound like Val's opinion as opposed to her author's (b) it's not true even within the world of the novel, because Amanda will marry Campion and they will have one of the great marriages of detective fiction and she will keep on working in aeronautics so professionally that, if I am remembering correctly, Campion refuses an assignment overseas because it would require her to leave her job. So your solution continues to make much more sense to me.
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I read a later edition in which all instances of "dago" were replaced with "Levantine" and guess what? It doesn't help!
The smart sympathetic character suddenly swooning and saying "ooh, yes darling, forbid me to have a career" really comes out of the blue -- well, she'd mentioned a couple of times that she found it wearing to feel responsible for everything at work, but I think I posted somewhere that the situation would have been better resolved with intermittent recreational BDSM rather than giving up one's day job.
You did!
I discovered last night while reading some biographical material about Allingham that she wrote The Fashion in Shrouds while almost having an extramarital affair with a man to whom she was passionately, unnervingly sexually attracted; in the end she didn't, but it required a conscious decision, and making it seems to have given her a lot of trouble. The author quoted a letter detailing Allingham's belief that sexual and artistic passion were merely different expressions of the same creative energy, meaning she actively worried that if she gave her spare time and attention to another partner, she wouldn't have anything left over for her work. Her resources were genuinely low at the time; she was under a lot of emotional strain and her health kept crashing. She broke the relationship off and finished the book. So with this information in mind it looks to me like Allingham gave Val her dilemma, but decided for the character in the opposite direction than she did for herself. I feel much more comfortable viewing the ending of Shrouds as a fictional road not taken, maybe even an exploration of wish-fulfillment, the hot guy rather than the hard work. The problem remains that (a) the statement "femininity unpossessed is a femininity unprotected from itself, a weakness and not a charm" is too much of a generalization to sound like Val's opinion as opposed to her author's (b) it's not true even within the world of the novel, because Amanda will marry Campion and they will have one of the great marriages of detective fiction and she will keep on working in aeronautics so professionally that, if I am remembering correctly, Campion refuses an assignment overseas because it would require her to leave her job. So your solution continues to make much more sense to me.