The book shop looks deceptively small on the outside. Dusty windows, old-fashioned architecture that recalls a time from a century earlier. A group of tourists walk past on the opposite side of the quiet street. There aren’t many cars, but there are plenty of walls made of smooth stone, warm from the sun.
Inside, the shop expands into multiple rooms and floors full of books, like something out of a Harry Potter movie. Which is appropriate considering that part of the movie was filmed just down the road.
I’m on a study abroad trip, and I should probably be composing my next project in my head, seeing as I’m supposed to be presenting later that week. But the book shop calls to me. I’ve been in about ten of them by this point in my trip, and I will find ten more by the time I go home.
When I ask the guy behind the counter about Dorothy L. Sayers, he immediately lights up. I follow him to huge table dedicated to the works Sayers and her fictional creation, Lord Peter Wimsey. The cashier recommends a few of his favorite Sayers novels, then leaves me to pick my poison.
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This trip, and the many novels and stories I read, were what inspired me to embark on my current project. The novel I bought that day in Oxford was Sayers’s Strong Poison, in which the detective is faced with the daunting task of helping Harriet Vane, a woman wrongly accused of murdering her lover. What struck me about this novel was that it started not during the investigation, as many detective stories do, but at the summing up of Vane’s trial, just before she’s about to be either convicted or acquitted. Using the judge’s summary and the comments of those in the audience, including several newspaper reporters, Sayers sets the tone of the novel. I was curious by this odd beginning. On one hand, this is a nice way to set up the entire case for the reader, right at the beginning, but I wondered especially about the comments by the reporters, and why so much attention was paid to them.
This is what ultimately led me to my current research. Thanks to the support of the OSU Libraries and the Undergraduate Research Office, I am spending the summer of 2019 working on my current project, studying newspaper articles on a few real women living in Britain who were accused of murder between 1850 and 1930, the latter being the year that Strong Poison was published. My goal is to compare the portrayal of these real women to the portrayal of the fictional Harriet Vane by the characters that observe her throughout the novel. I am studying the way they are described before, during and especially after, the trial, looking at what about these women that the periodicals highlight, and how the accounts of these women are similar and different to the way Sayers has her characters portray Vane.
My copy of Dorothy L. Sayer’s novel, which I bought in Oxford, England. Cited below. Photo Credit: Whitney Kneffler
Much of my research over the past two weeks has been brushing up on my knowledge of Harriet Vane, and what Judith Flanders, in her fascinating book The Invention of Murder terms, “the poison panic” of the 1840s, a time when the British public was oddly obsessed with poison trials and being poisoned (Flanders, 245). As Flanders points out, though, “poisoning was frightening because it involved intimacy.” (Flanders, 183). And arsenic, the poison which Harriet Vane is accused of using on her lover in Strong Poison, was the part of the driving force between the Poison Panic, because it was found in dozens of household items, and it was very cheap (Flanders, 232). In her book, Chemical Crimes, Cheryl Blake Price tries to untangle the gendered nature of the poisoner as portrayed in fiction and sensationalized by periodicals. Poison could be looked at as an equalizing force across gender, class, and age. Though not all fictional poisoners were portrayed as women, many fictional female criminals were women, and poison thus has a persistent reputation as being the murderesses (Price, 9). Poison required only a little knowledge, and access to a person, and thus could be utilized by anyone. Hence, why the newspapers, as Flanders notes, laid so much stress on women poisoners, especially working-class women poisoners (Flanders, 234).
Armed with this background of the figure of the female poisoner, I looked at Harriet Vane’s trial and her presence throughout the novel. There were a few specific things that the other characters stressed about her, especially when it came to her guilt or innocence, these being Vane’s appearance, her sexual freedom, and her class in society.
Throughout the novel, whether it is reporters or Wimsey’s own relatives, Vane’s appearance is constantly commented on. Under this fairly vague term, ‘appearance’ I include not only the person’s physical attributes/description, but also the character’s behavior, as that also has much to do with how a person appears. Near the beginning, one of Wimsey’s friends, a little annoyed that the case is dragging on so long, comments that “the girl’s not even pretty,” (Sayers, 18). The judge notes in his summary of the case that Vane didn’t ask after her lover, or attend his funeral, (Sayers, 24). Vane’s appearance is very much used by those in the audience to determine her guilt or innocence. One unnamed girl comments, “Of course she did it. You could see it in her face. Hard, that’s what I call it, and she never once cried or anything.” (Sayers, 34-35).
Then there is Vane’s sexual freedom. Prior to this trial, Vane had lived briefly with her lover, Philip Boyes, outside of the traditional bonds of marriage, a man who wrote extensively on ideas such as “free love” (Sayers, 3). Her relationship with Boyes is emphasized in the case, because it was later the result of a quarrel that Vane had with him. Boyes offered to marry Vane, but rather than take up this offer, which the judge thinks would have been best, Vane is annoyed by his proposal, and feels that Boyes “made a fool of her.” (Sayers, 7) Even though this quarrel is the only motive presented for the murder, something in the judge’s tone implies that while he thinks this is not really a good proposed motive for murder, he thinks that there is something rather wrong with Vane to begin with, seeing as the “remarkable” cause of the quarrel was that Boyes made an “honorable” proposal to marry her.
Finally, there is the matter of Vane’s societal class. Vane’s parents died when she was 23, leaving her to “make her own way in the world,” and since that time, she has “worked industriously to keep herself, and… made herself independent,” by writing detective stories (Sayers, 4). Though she has a popular career that even Wimsey’s mother follows (Sayers, 34), Vane is certainly not of an upper class, and may not even quite reach the middle class. In much of my preliminary studies on a few real cases of female poisoners, the sympathy or antipathy of the newspapers certainly seems to depend heavily on the woman’s class, especially in the case of Madeleine Smith, who I’ve been currently researching, and who is also mentioned in this novel (Sayers, 145).
Having done this brief study of Harriet Vane, I now plan to turn to a few real women who were accused of murder by poison. Madeleine Smith seemed an obvious choice, as she was explicitly mentioned in Strong Poison. However, I am not just looking for the link of poison in all of these women’s cases, but also the way they are described by the newspapers, in terms of the three things above: appearance, sexual freedom, and class. Smith, like Vane, was accused of poisoning her lover with arsenic, and she and her lover also had an ‘illicit’ connection. Adelaide Bartlett is another interesting case with many similarities to Smith and Vane, not just in the method of poisoning, but also in her sexual freedom and societal class. I hope to be able to have more information on each of these women, and one other accused murderess soon, in order to be able to do a comparison of their portrayals to each other, and also to Harriet Vane.
Bibliography:
Flanders, Judith.”Panic.” The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Fiction, Thomas Dunne Books, 2011, pp. 183-247.
Price, Cheryl Blake. Chemical Crimes: Science & Poison in Victorian Crime Fiction. The Ohio State University Press, 2019.
Sayers, Dorothy L. Strong Poison. Hodder & Stoughton, 2016.
All photos in this page were taken by myself. Further photographs from my study abroad can be found on my Facebook page.