When Harriet Vane returns to her alma mater, Shrewsbury College (I believe this is a fictional college. While worrying about spoilers for a book seventy years old is silly, I don’t trust websites and wikipedia to not spoil me for
Busman’s Honeymoon enough to investigate.) she reconnects with her old friends despite her fears of being shunned due to her murder trial five years earlier. Months later , she’s contacted by the dean about a problem the college is having with someone pulling pranks and leaving poison pen letters, and is asked to stay at the college and help get to the bottom of things. (A bit off topic, but I have to wonder if that’s a deliberate parallel to Peter being asked to return to the village months later in
The Nine Tailors.)
Despite this technically being a mystery novel, and a
Lord Peter Wimsey one at that, the book isn’t actually a mystery-though it does have a mystery in it-nor is it about Peter, who’s barely in the book. Instead it’s about Harriet, and her internal war of intellect versus emotion as she attempts to come to terms with her feelings about Peter, and what to do about them. Despite the fact that we initially met her when she was on trial for the murder of a lover she refused to marry, Harriet has struck me from the start as being rather Victorian in her views, while also clearly valuing her independence and career. As such, it’s no surprise that she would view marriage to Peter as giving a part of herself up, as sacrificing some of who she is to become part of who he is. (This is, sadly, still a concern seven decades later, as marriage still has the stigma of wives submitting to husbands, and women being the ones to give up careers for family.)
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