Domina: Feminism in the Detective Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy Leigh Sayers attended Somerville College, Oxford, before women were deemed eligible for degrees there. (She was one of the first to be awarded one when that rule was changed.) She dabbled in teaching, which she disliked, but she spent a couple of years working as a copy writer for advertising. (She did not, it seems, coin the phrase “My goodness, my Guinness,” but she created the Guinness toucan.) She had several affairs, one of which resulted in a child. In 1923, she published her first detective novel, Whose Body? And although the main character was male, Lord Peter Wimsey, the themes of feminism in her work were unmistakable.

In part, of course, there was author-insert Harriet Vane. Harriet’s first appearance was in Strong Poison in 1930. She was on trial for murder for the poisoning death of her lover. Lord Peter cleared her of the crime, finding the real culprit; he proposed marriage. This had originally been the planned ending of the series, but Sayers couldn’t afford that. She kept writing, and the relationship between Harriet and Peter developed. Her actual final Wimsey novel was 1937’s Busman’s Honeymoon, also produced as a play, wherein Peter and Harriet marry and go on a honeymoon, only for Peter’s manservant Bunter to discover a body in the basement of their honeymoon cottage.

If the novels started seven years before the advent of Harriet, though, and she doesn’t even appear in all the books between 1930 and 1937, how else does Sayers make feminism a theme? By giving the female characters as much time and attention as the male ones. Oh, Lord Peter, of course. But even in the first book, set in the then-masculine world of medicine, features the delightful Mrs. Thipps and the first appearance of the Dowager Duchess, Peter’s mother. Mrs. Thipps is an extremely minor character in the piece but absolutely steals the scene she’s in.

The next book, Clouds of Witness, would introduce Lady Mary Wimsey, Peter’s younger sister. Lady Mary is young and wild and a Communist. (Gasp!) She sleeps in pajamas. (Gasp!) She’s involved with a lower-class man. (Swoon!) Peter treats her like a silly younger sister, inasmuch as she is his younger sister, but he also takes her feelings seriously. The book also features a woman in an abusive relationship and doesn’t shame her for it or her choice to be with a kinder man. There’s the appalling Duchess of Denver, Peter’s sister-in-law Helen, but if we can’t have an awful female character, is that equality?

Unnatural Death would introduce Miss Climpson, who runs an organization Peter has put together to shut down scammers and things. He uses her as a personal investigator in two different books and references her a few other times; another member of the organization, Miss Murchison, is also an important character in Strong Poison. Both women are no longer young—Miss Climpson is distinctly Victorian, and Miss Murchison is perhaps forty—and trying to make a living in interwar Britain. This would be a major theme; The Unpleasantness at the Belona Club would have Sheila Fentiman, who worked to support her shell-shocked husband.

Lady Mary would be courted and won by a police detective and enter into an arrangement where she and her husband would have exactly equal income, even though, as the daughter of a duke, she was independently wealthy. Her money would be held in trust for their children, and she learned how to live on a small budget. Many of the other women in the books would not be so fortunate and would work because they had this pesky fondness for eating and sleeping indoors. In Have His Carcase, Harriet even spends time with assorted people blatantly planning to marry for money if they can manage it, because it’s security.

The most obvious book with feminist themes is Gaudy Night. Harriet returns to her alma mater, the fictional Shrewsbury College, for reasons. The college is deep in the midst of a poison pen breakout, and the writer’s messages are strongly anti-feminist. The book also has the first rumblings of concern about the place of women in Nazi Germany. Harriet and the other women of Shrewsbury are academics, and there is the fear that this makes them “unwomanly” and unfit for womanly things.

It is clear that Sayers does not agree with this stance, but it also becomes clear that she doesn’t think anyone should care. She puts the words in Peter’s mouth that it’s none of his business what the women choose to do or not do. Obviously he cares about what Harriet does, because he is still wooing her, but that’s on a personal level. Harriet is an adult, and she shouldn’t have to get the approval of a man to follow her dreams—and there’s no reason a woman can’t dream of the same sorts of things as a man.

Lord Peter is generally accepted to have been what Sayers thought of as an ideal man, and one of the things he loved about Harriet was her intelligence. Yes, there were women in the books who were perfectly happy being conventional, leaving lives as wives and mothers. But there are also enough widows in the books to make it clear that you can’t just count on the protection of a husband even if that’s the life you choose. Sayers knew; she lived in a time and place where vast numbers of young men had been killed, meaning that vast numbers of women would never marry. No wonder it informs her books.