Takes more than charm if you're going to get me to confess
So I'm reading a thread about Josephine Tey over at ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants' where people are anti-recommending Miss Pym Disposes (1946) and The Franchise Affair (1948) and I don't disagree with them in either case—I've read the latter and everyone who has ever mentioned the former to me included the caution that it can turn you off Tey for life. It interests me that this happens with authors, the one or two books out of an otherwise enjoyable body of work that need warning against/exorcism with fire and salt. In the case of The Franchise Affair, it seems fairly clear that the unexamined classism which runs in an undercurrent through all of Tey's work simply rose from the depths and ate the premise alive. That model does not explain Margery Allingham's The Fashion in Shrouds (1938), since unexamined misogyny does not otherwise afflict the other eighteen Campion novels (but in order to figure out the cause I'd have to re-read the book, so I haven't yet). I recognize that the phenomenon is idiosyncratic—I finally bounced off a novel by Mary Stewart when I read Wildfire at Midnight (1956) because its mystery is perfectly well-constructed but its romance depends on reconciliation between two people who had really good reasons to be divorced. I'm not really asking for a list of books to avoid, but I'm curious about other people's experiences with the outliers that suddenly bit them. Is it usually the case that a regrettable but generally background tendency comes to the fore because of specific plot conditions and there goes the neighborhood? Is it just that the brain-eater stopped by for a midnight snack and left by the next book in the series? Do you have no idea what happened, but for God's sake don't read that one anyway? Inquiring minds! And then, so as not to be totally down on literature, this literary mixtape is pretty awesome.
skygiants' where people are anti-recommending Miss Pym Disposes (1946) and The Franchise Affair (1948) and I don't disagree with them in either case—I've read the latter and everyone who has ever mentioned the former to me included the caution that it can turn you off Tey for life. It interests me that this happens with authors, the one or two books out of an otherwise enjoyable body of work that need warning against/exorcism with fire and salt. In the case of The Franchise Affair, it seems fairly clear that the unexamined classism which runs in an undercurrent through all of Tey's work simply rose from the depths and ate the premise alive. That model does not explain Margery Allingham's The Fashion in Shrouds (1938), since unexamined misogyny does not otherwise afflict the other eighteen Campion novels (but in order to figure out the cause I'd have to re-read the book, so I haven't yet). I recognize that the phenomenon is idiosyncratic—I finally bounced off a novel by Mary Stewart when I read Wildfire at Midnight (1956) because its mystery is perfectly well-constructed but its romance depends on reconciliation between two people who had really good reasons to be divorced. I'm not really asking for a list of books to avoid, but I'm curious about other people's experiences with the outliers that suddenly bit them. Is it usually the case that a regrettable but generally background tendency comes to the fore because of specific plot conditions and there goes the neighborhood? Is it just that the brain-eater stopped by for a midnight snack and left by the next book in the series? Do you have no idea what happened, but for God's sake don't read that one anyway? Inquiring minds! And then, so as not to be totally down on literature, this literary mixtape is pretty awesome.
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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.
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I wonder if some of that also went into Campion's sudden attraction to Linda Sutane in Dancers in Mourning, which came out the year before The Fashion in Shrouds.
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I would believe it. I think the writing-vs.-publication timeline even works.
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The Adventures of Margery Allingham (1991) by Julia Jones. It looks like the standard biography. I could only get about five pages of it on Google Books; fortunately, they were five pages germane to the topic I had been searching for ("What the hell, ending of The Fashion in Shrouds?!").
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After my last post in this sub-thread, I'd tried to think if there was any way Val could have looked at the events of the book and reasoned that since the villain killed ruthlessly to keep a woman from giving up her career, therefore persuading a woman to give up her career, being the opposite tack, was an objective good; but I think Val's decision had nothing to do with the murder plot and everything to do with still being depressed over the theft of her dress design at the opening of the story. It's the sort of decision she might reconsider an a month, and I can only hope her fiancé rethinks his stance as well; or alternately that they both become fascinated by oceanography or something and start working on that together.
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I think I like my novels best when I can extrapolate from their endings if I feel like it, but I don't have to rewrite them.
(Classy diving suits, though.)