I hesitate to call this ‘a Lord Peter book.’ Peter is here, certainly, though in lesser proportion than you might expect, considering he changes in quiet but extraordinary ways. But this book is rightly and greatly Harriet Vane’s, as she returns to the Oxford college of her education to do some academic work, write her next novel, and investigate some nasty disturbances around the college.
Oh. For Oxford alone, which I love, I could love this book. Luckily, however, there are any number of other reasons. This is a book about pain, about the heart and the mind working in opposition, about academia, about the perils of being an intelligent woman, about the perils of unthinking feminism, about mistakes, about love. Harriet has been trampled over by the world and left in the mud, and I love how Sayers understands the way she would snap and snarl at the first hand that reached out to help her, and resent its very kindness. Harriet wants to stop hurting, and she thinks she knows how.
If only one could come back to this quiet place where only intellectual achievement counted, if one could work here steadily and obscurely at some close-knit piece of reasoning, undistracted and uncorrupted . . . abolishing personal contacts, personal spites, personal jealousies, getting one’s teeth into something dull and durable, maturing into solidity like the Shrewsbury beeches, then one might be able to forget the wreck and chaos of the past, or see it, at any rate, in a truer proportion.
It’s a beautiful thought, and it’s all the ways that academia is
not like this that will keep me away.
In this book it’s a more painfully direct question, given the social climate of the times, between academia and marriage. It’s a practical result of separated colleges, of course, but also a more fundamental observation about the ways that female achievement can become a barrier in and of itself. “. . . the rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed . . . or find a still greater man to marry her.” And though the exact correlations of virginity and academia do not apply to us today, the idea of woman having to choose between achievement and relationships still resonates eighty years later. Hell, just ask
Time Magazine, apparently.
But it’s more complex for Harriet, who tried living by the heart once before, with disastrous consequences. This book is about her learning to use her heart again, but to do it in balance with the mind. She is coming to know that passion and reason are not antithetical, that applying the second to the first makes them both greater, not less. Peter is learning the same thing from the other side of the coin, as Harriet refuses his proposals again and again and again and he comes to know that simply wanting and asking are an exercise of privilege, and not the extent of love.
“It’s the pressure of other people’s personalities that does the mischief.”
“Yes. . . .You may say you won’t interfere with another person’s soul, but you do merely by existing. The snag about it is the practical difficulty, so to speak, of not existing.”
They both know how awful love can be when it is all heart or all brain, when it presses and demands and makes sacrifices and then says “now what will you do for me in return?” They are both just growing into the awareness that there is another way.
I think, above all, the thing I admire most in this book is the way it practices what it preaches. Sayers’ brain is here, as it always has been, but for perhaps the first time, her heart is too. Harriet, her partial avatar, is also learning that the heart is required in equal measure in writing as in love – in any work of importance.
“You would have to abandon the jigsaw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change.”
“I’m afraid to try that, Peter. It might go to near the bone.”
“It might be the wisest thing you could do.”
“Write it out and get rid of it?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll think about that. It would hurt like hell.”
“What would that matter, if it made a good book?”
I won’t go into Sayers’ biography here. But as Peter says, “you can’t keep the feeling out.” The beauty of this book is the way Sayers is here, unashamedly, honestly, with enough distance to be lucid and thoughtful, but enough heart still in it to hurt, and to matter. And that’s the point of the book – writing like that Is writing well, and living like that is living well.
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The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers
