I shall try to restrain myself to a reasonable length...
How I feel about this character
I started the Wimsey books with Gaudy Night and spent the first few chapters wondering who on earth this woman was, why the book wasn’t about Peter Wimsey, when would he turn up, and what was all the backstory about. And also falling completely for Harriet, a state which has never left me.
I absolutely love Harriet, and I think she’s a brilliant character. I don’t think that she is perfect, and she isn’t always a nice person; she can be very judgemental, has a snobbish streak, and is not always a terrific judge of character.* But she has a great deal of intelligence, humour, courage, integrity, a realistic assessment of her literary output, and I find her refusal to be crushed by circumstances, or other people’s assumptions about her circumstances, wholly admirable.
I don’t see her as an author avatar – DLS’s “I want to be my character” is Peter Wimsey. Harriet Vane is what she’d have liked in a husband - someone competent and interesting who cares about making you happy.
Once again one admires Annie Wilson’s acute grasp of psychology in choosing as a victim the student that Harriet dismisses as a shop girl with a common accent despite the extreme unlikelihood of such a person being in that place at that time.
All the people I ship romantically with this character
Peter Wimsey! I am not averse to a bit of Peter/Harriet/Bunter, either. She is not very susceptible to shipping otherwise (or even this-wise most of the time), on account of being judgemental and having an inferiority complex.
My non-romantic OTP for this character
I wish we knew more about the friend of the European trip. They spend a long time together, so it must have been a good friendship to still be talking at the end of it! (Or perhaps they aren’t).
I like Harriet/the Dean, the way it has transitioned from a student/teacher relationship to one of equals, and the way they evidently find one another’s company fun. I have no idea what the shirt-popping scene was actually like, but I love the idea of the two of them getting into one of those awful situations when you can’t stop laughing with a conspirator.
My unpopular opinion about this character
I have mentioned (twice!) Harriet as judgemental. This side of her personality is certainly disliked personality on the Lord Peter list, but personally, her acerbic (and private) reflections on the appalling clothes of her fellow Shrewsbury students was one of the things I really liked about her on first reading, because it is exactly the sort of thing a lot of people (including me) do, and it was funny with it.
One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.
That there was more! I wish, wish, wish that Sayers had completed Thrones, Dominations, complete with massive post-honeymoon row mid-book.
An oddity about Harriet in canon is that we like quite a few biographical details: when did her mother die, when did her father die, what did she do to earn a living immediately after university/before she published her first book. I suppose we might have got more of this had there been further novels and it been relevant.
Something about them I consider true, even though it's only my head canon/fanon
I think she was/is a more enthusiastic Bohemian than she sometimes comes across as. Five years after Strong Poison she’s still closely enough involved to be going to parties and being told all the gossip, even if she’s not in the mood for it at that point (and some of the dissatisfaction there I think comes from an increasing feeling that she should be doing more with her own work). We simply don’t see it because for all their faults, the young artists of Bohemia are a law-abiding lot when it comes to violent crime and blackmail.
I suspect that while she enjoys having her children, Peter probably does quite a lot of the emotional work with them.
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Date: 2014-05-28 03:22 pm (UTC)How I feel about this character
I started the Wimsey books with Gaudy Night and spent the first few chapters wondering who on earth this woman was, why the book wasn’t about Peter Wimsey, when would he turn up, and what was all the backstory about. And also falling completely for Harriet, a state which has never left me.
I absolutely love Harriet, and I think she’s a brilliant character. I don’t think that she is perfect, and she isn’t always a nice person; she can be very judgemental, has a snobbish streak, and is not always a terrific judge of character.* But she has a great deal of intelligence, humour, courage, integrity, a realistic assessment of her literary output, and I find her refusal to be crushed by circumstances, or other people’s assumptions about her circumstances, wholly admirable.
I don’t see her as an author avatar – DLS’s “I want to be my character” is Peter Wimsey. Harriet Vane is what she’d have liked in a husband - someone competent and interesting who cares about making you happy.
Once again one admires Annie Wilson’s acute grasp of psychology in choosing as a victim the student that Harriet dismisses as a shop girl with a common accent despite the extreme unlikelihood of such a person being in that place at that time.
All the people I ship romantically with this character
Peter Wimsey! I am not averse to a bit of Peter/Harriet/Bunter, either. She is not very susceptible to shipping otherwise (or even this-wise most of the time), on account of being judgemental and having an inferiority complex.
My non-romantic OTP for this character
I wish we knew more about the friend of the European trip. They spend a long time together, so it must have been a good friendship to still be talking at the end of it! (Or perhaps they aren’t).
I like Harriet/the Dean, the way it has transitioned from a student/teacher relationship to one of equals, and the way they evidently find one another’s company fun. I have no idea what the shirt-popping scene was actually like, but I love the idea of the two of them getting into one of those awful situations when you can’t stop laughing with a conspirator.
My unpopular opinion about this character
I have mentioned (twice!) Harriet as judgemental. This side of her personality is certainly disliked personality on the Lord Peter list, but personally, her acerbic (and private) reflections on the appalling clothes of her fellow Shrewsbury students was one of the things I really liked about her on first reading, because it is exactly the sort of thing a lot of people (including me) do, and it was funny with it.
One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.
That there was more! I wish, wish, wish that Sayers had completed Thrones, Dominations, complete with massive post-honeymoon row mid-book.
An oddity about Harriet in canon is that we like quite a few biographical details: when did her mother die, when did her father die, what did she do to earn a living immediately after university/before she published her first book. I suppose we might have got more of this had there been further novels and it been relevant.
Something about them I consider true, even though it's only my head canon/fanon
I think she was/is a more enthusiastic Bohemian than she sometimes comes across as. Five years after Strong Poison she’s still closely enough involved to be going to parties and being told all the gossip, even if she’s not in the mood for it at that point (and some of the dissatisfaction there I think comes from an increasing feeling that she should be doing more with her own work). We simply don’t see it because for all their faults, the young artists of Bohemia are a law-abiding lot when it comes to violent crime and blackmail.
I suspect that while she enjoys having her children, Peter probably does quite a lot of the emotional work with them.