BH has always irritated me because of the lengths it goes to to rub Peter and Harriet's Wonderful Togetherness into Miss Twitterton's face
I always skip that bit because it's too excruciatingly embarrassing for everybody, including me. But it's satisfying that it's the Wonderful Togetherness that leads to the potentially marriage-wrecking "do we grass up Miss T as a suspect?" conversation where Peter once more thinks that just giving Harriet her own way will make everything all right again.
When I first read BH, I was 19 and it was the second Sayers I'd read after Gaudy Night so I was awash in the romance and rather bemused as to why Sayers clearly thought Peter crying in her arms was a triumph for Harriet. But on re-reading and re-reading and re-reading since, and acquiring rather more life experience, I've found myself going "but hang on a minute..." about all sorts of things and Nineveh_uk's insightful insights make perfect sense. I have seen the play but can't remember how much of the marriage/power/knowledge of each other's innermost yick problem was in that and how much was glued in afterwards for the book (apart from the prologue and epilogue and the sundial churchyard scene, which are definitely book only).
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-20 01:53 pm (UTC)I always skip that bit because it's too excruciatingly embarrassing for everybody, including me. But it's satisfying that it's the Wonderful Togetherness that leads to the potentially marriage-wrecking "do we grass up Miss T as a suspect?" conversation where Peter once more thinks that just giving Harriet her own way will make everything all right again.
When I first read BH, I was 19 and it was the second Sayers I'd read after Gaudy Night so I was awash in the romance and rather bemused as to why Sayers clearly thought Peter crying in her arms was a triumph for Harriet. But on re-reading and re-reading and re-reading since, and acquiring rather more life experience, I've found myself going "but hang on a minute..." about all sorts of things and Nineveh_uk's insightful insights make perfect sense. I have seen the play but can't remember how much of the marriage/power/knowledge of each other's innermost yick problem was in that and how much was glued in afterwards for the book (apart from the prologue and epilogue and the sundial churchyard scene, which are definitely book only).