I am 73 years old and happily married, but I recently fell in love—not with an actual person but with a fictional character. This sort of thing hasn’t happened since high school, when Heathcliff inflamed my adolescent imagination. But now, after a lifetime of reading, I find myself besotted by Lord Peter Wimsey, the amateur detective of uncanny insight and resourcefulness who figures in 11 novels and numerous stories by Dorothy L. Sayers.
Sayers was one of the queens of detective fiction’s so-called Golden Age, a period in the 1920s and ’30s that featured such virtuosos of the genre as Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh. When I read Sayers in my youth, I was immune to Peter Wimsey’s charms, but my idea of a heartthrob has changed considerably since the 10th grade. Lord Peter is no orphaned, alienated bad boy. He is the wealthy second son of a duke, with a family estate and a devoted valet (the imperturbable and supremely competent Bunter). He took a first-class degree in modern history from Balliol College, Oxford, and is knowledgeable about most everything, from the symptoms of thyroid disease to the fine points of ballistics and dental identification. He collects incunabula (books printed prior to 1501) and is competent in the art of campanology. He is a champion cricketer, so well known during his Oxford days that an elderly man, seeing him play on an amateur team some 20 years later, recognizes Wimsey of Balliol who scored 112 points for Oxford in 1911. He is fluent in several languages, including French, having also been schooled in manners and sex by his French uncle. He is a connoisseur of music and plays Bach on the piano. Finally, he served valiantly in the First World War and is often called on to resolve knotty diplomatic issues for the British foreign service (in the mid-1930s, his fluency in German is a useful adjunct to his diplomatic skills).
Lord Peter, as he is known to all, hearkens back to an era when England had a strict and immutable class hierarchy. And yet, he makes good use of his advantages, working tirelessly and spending lavishly in the cause of justice. For example, he underwrites an entire employment agency for unmarried women, whom he deploys on special missions related to his cases. He is also compassionate, prone to falling into paralyzing depression after the culprits he has unmasked are sent to the gallows.
Sayers’s hero is not without flaws, however. He has a big nose and wears a monocle. He is a bit of a dandy (his socks match his pocket square). He is often flippant in conventionally grave situations and frequently cites lines from poetry that few people recognize. He also speaks with a slight stammer, the result of the PTSD he suffers from his service in the war. But these little quirks that mar his perfection, far from reducing my affection, make me love him all the more. Unlike many other Golden Age detectives, Wimsey has depth, increasingly so as the series of books featuring him progresses. When I happened on three 1980s BBC adaptations of the novels on YouTube, I was enchanted by Edward Petherbridge, who, in the role of Wimsey, could stammer and say “frightfully sorry” with aplomb. Each time Petherbridge’s Wimsey adjusted his monocle, my heart fluttered.
I have extravagantly extolled Peter Wimsey to my friends, bullying them to read at least one of Sayers’s novels, only to find myself disappointed when they aren’t charmed by the character. One woman, who shares my taste in most things, called him foppish and effeminate. How could she so misread a figure of such consummate, if complex, masculinity? Fortunately, I found a group of enthusiasts on Reddit who are, like me, smitten with Wimsey down to the monocle. I have concluded that we are a happy few and share qualities with his creator, a woman admittedly not to everyone’s tastes.
Dorothy Sayers was opinionated and intellectually curious. The only child of doting parents, she was born in Oxford and grew up in rural East Anglia, where her father, an Anglican priest, was headmaster of a school for boys. She went on to attend Somerville, one of Oxford’s first women’s colleges, and earned a first-class degree in medieval French. As a young woman, she had many flirtations, fell in love and was jilted, had an affair and secretly bore a child out of wedlock, and worked as an editor, a teacher, and an advertising copywriter before hitting on the recipe for her detective novels. At the height of their popularity, she abandoned the series and took to writing religious plays and translating Dante.
For those of us who are in love with Peter Wimsey, Sayers’s turn away from detective fiction seems a loss. We want more Wimsey novels. By the same token, there isn’t more to say after Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), the culmination of a four-novel romantic arc that focuses on the relationship between Lord Peter and the mystery novelist Harriet Vane. This arc begins with Strong Poison (1930), when Wimsey reads in the newspaper that Vane is on trial for the murder of her lover. During their first meeting, in the prison where she is being held, he immediately concludes that she is innocent and proposes marriage. She rejects him, finding the proposal ridiculous. After he solves the case and she is acquitted, he continues to propose regularly, every three months or so—and she continues to reject him, not wishing to feel beholden for his having saved her life. Finally, in Gaudy Night (1935), the penultimate novel in the series, she succumbs. Set in a fictional women’s college at Oxford modeled after Sayers’s Somerville, Gaudy Night includes some stirring descriptions of the beauties of the university and the delights of academic scholarship. A running point of discussion involves the relative merits of body and mind, marriage and work, scholarship and popular writing. Wimsey’s final proposal comes in an intoxicating passage at the end, after the mystery at the college is resolved. Here he is addressing the woman he loves:
“I have said a good deal to you one way and another, lately; but you may have noticed that since we came to Oxford I have not asked you to marry me. … But I will ask you now, and if you say No, I promise you that this time I will accept your answer. Harriet; you know that I love you: will you marry me?” …
She stood still; and he stopped perforce and turned towards her. She laid both hands upon the fronts of his gown, looking into his face while she searched for the word that should carry her over the last difficult breach.
It was he who found it for her. With a gesture of submission he bared his head and stood gravely, the square cap dangling in his hand.
“Placetne, magistra?”
“Placet.”
Yes, the culmination of the proposal (Does it seem good, mistress/teacher?) and its acceptance (It seems good ) are in Latin! As one of my sisters online put it, “Maybe it’s just me and my love for languages. But this is the most romantic proposal I’ve ever read.”
Harriet finally capitulates to Lord Peter not only because she has fallen in love with him but also because she realizes that he will never use his wealth, class, or male prerogative to bully or coerce her. In a moving scene toward the end of Gaudy Night, she is advised by a senior scholar at the college:
“You have had the luck to come up against a very unselfish and a very honest man. He has done what you asked him without caring what it costs him and without shirking the issue. He hasn’t tried to disguise the facts or bias your judgment. … He’ll never make up your mind for you. You’ll have to make your own decisions. You needn’t be afraid of losing your independence; he will always force it back on you. If you ever find any kind of repose with him, it can only be the repose of very delicate balance.”
Lord Peter, as Harriet comes to see, loves her as a singular intellectual and moral being. They are matched spirits, an equality that carries an irresistible romantic charge.
Which brings me to my own case. My husband has had to weather my infatuation for Peter Wimsey for more than a year now. He has had to listen to me go on and on about the character’s wit, wealth, and athletic prowess, his fluency in French, his piano-playing, and his diplomatic sensibility. Who could live up to such talent and accomplishment? It’s an impossible standard. Fortunately, my husband and Lord Peter share one quality that is, for Harriet and for me, the most important. Rare even in this seemingly progressive age is my husband’s conviction that I am his intellectual and moral equal and that the vestiges of male superiority that cling to him, as they do to Peter Wimsey (we are not so far removed today from 1930s patriarchy), are to be continually and strenuously resisted. To be loved with that awareness and determination by someone of worth is very attractive, whether he wears a monocle or not.
