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Work vs/and Family: Womens' Dilemma in Cross/Heilbrun and Sayers
(c) Sara R. Tompson
I've been, finally, reading Amanda Cross' [pen name of the, sadly, late Columbia Univ. feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun] later Professor Kate Fansler mysteries (some of which were published posthumously). The first later one I read a few years back was Honest Doubt and I did not love it that much. But I recently re-read it, and really enjoyed it. That got me to download a few more to my Kindle [I have the old/first one; still love it!].
I just recently finished The Puzzled Heart, and despite the perhaps a bit less polished, angrier, writing style in this and most of her later mysteries, I've re-realized I still love Cross' feminist mysteries, just as I have loved for years Dorothy Sayers' mysteries, especially her most feminist Gaudy Night, which I re-read almost annually (and will be doing again shortly!)
Puzzled Heart starts not with a murder, but with the kidnapping of Kate's husband Reed (now a law professor, formerly a district attorney). It turns out this was intended to get to Kate more than Reed.
In Gaudy Night, Harriet Vane, now a successful mystery writer and somewhat involved with Sayers' main detective Lord Peter Wimsey, returns to her university college to work on a book, and gets embroiled in a poison pen letters escapade that escalates. The poison pen is attacking university educated women who have less focus on family than the hate writer believes proper.
Naturally there've been vaguish links in my mind between Cross and Fansler and Sayers and Harriet Vane, but in Honest Doubt there was one passage so clearly resonant of a key theme in Gaudy Night, I just had to "highlight" and "bookmark" it! [Thanks to my colleague Ivan for getting me in to using these Kindle mark up features!] Here it is (from location 1577 in the Kindle edition); a character is speaking, hence the embedded quotation marks):
" 'The whole think smacks to me of an envious woman, one who's known you a long time, and is furious at your success, relative to her self-perceived failure, or lack of success.' "
You can see from the brief summaries above the similar themes. Here is a statement of the theme from Gaudy Night from the clearly irrational poison pen; who is in part Cross' "envious woman":
" ' ...but it's you, it's women like you who take the work away from the men and break their hearts and lives. No wonder you can't get men for yourselves and hate the women who can. Good keep the men out of your hands, that's what I say. You'd destroy your own husbands, if you had any, for an old book or bit of writing...' " (Sayers, Dorothy L. Gaudy Night. New York: Harper & Row Perennial Library, 1986, p. 443).
I did a bit of research, and no one seems to have done much explicitly comparing these two mystery novels. I did find Johanna Smith's 1991 article "Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction: Gendering the Canon" where she makes a brief mention worth citing here:
"Dorothy Sayers's Gaudy Night, Valerie Miner's Murder in the English Department, and many of Amanda Cross's books dramatize the external and internalized problems of women who choose the intellectual or academic life over the domestic,"
(Smith, Johanna M. 1991. "Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction: Gendering the Canon" Pacific Coast Philology 26(1/2), p. 80).
[Clearly I need to find and Miner's book!]
I intend to do some more writing about these two authors, some of my favorite genre writers ever and always.
Can you tell my undergrad degree is in English?!
