Miss Climpson

One of the more interesting secondary characters in the Wimsey novels of Dorothy L. Sayers is Miss Climpson — more fully, Alexandra Katherine Climpson, as she is called when we first meet her in Unnatural Death (1927). By Strong Poison (1930) she is known as Katharine Climpson (note the altered spelling as well as the absence of Alexandra). The change is a mystery I cannot solve, but Sayers — who wrote a whole essay explaining why Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories is usually called John but sometimes James — would probably like to see me try.

Back to Unnatural Death: we meet Miss Climpson when Lord Peter brings his policeman friend Charles Parker to her apartment, slyly encouraging Charles to think that he’s paying a visit to a kept woman of his:

The door was opened by a thin, middle-aged woman, with a sharp, sallow face and very vivacious manner. She wore a neat, dark coat and skirt, a high-necked blouse and a long gold neck-chain with a variety of small ornaments dangling from it at intervals, and her iron-grey hair was dressed under a net, in the style fashionable in the reign of the late King Edward.

Let’s pause for a moment to organize time. The novel’s setting is contemporary: we can be certain of this because it ends with a glimpse of the total solar eclipse of 29 June 1927. We know from other books in the series that Lord Peter was born in 1890, so that makes him 37. The “reign of the late King Edward” was 1901–1910. People who stop updating their style of dress usually do so (in my experience) when they’re around thirty, so while the adjective “middle-aged” is a vague one, I think with this hint about clothing and the presence of the “iron-grey hair” we can safely place Miss Climpson in her mid-fifties. (No younger, I think: in Strong Poison she’s referred to as “elderly.”)

Let us also add — this information will soon be useful — that when this novel was published Sayers herself was 34, and Harriet Vane — her most important female character, whom we will not meet for a while — is 24, and fairly recently graduated from Oxford University.

Now, back to Miss Climpson. After Lord Peter enjoys his joke on Inspector Parker and they depart, Parker wants a proper explanation and gets one:

“Miss Climpson,” said Lord Peter, “is a manifestation of the wasteful way in which this country is run. Look at electricity. Look at water-power. Look at the tides. Look at the sun. Millions of power units being given off into space every minute. Thousands of old maids, simply bursting with useful energy, forced by our stupid social system into hydros and hotels and communities and hostels and posts as companions, where their magnificent gossip-powers and units of inquisitiveness are allowed to dissipate themselves or even become harmful to the community, while the ratepayers’ money is spent on getting work for which these women are providentially fitted, inefficiently carried out by ill-equipped policemen like you….

“She is my ears and tongue,” said Lord Peter, dramatically, “and especially my nose. She asks questions which a young man could not put without a blush. She is the angel that rushes in where fools get a clump on the head. She can smell a rat in the dark. In fact, she is the cat’s whiskers…. People want questions asked. Whom do they send? A man with large flat feet and a note-book — the sort of man whose private life is conducted in a series of inarticulate grunts. I send a lady with a long, woolly jumper on knitting-needles and jingly things round her neck. Of course she asks questions — everyone expects it. Nobody is surprised. Nobody is alarmed.

Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple — many readers will already have her in mind — makes much the same point in A Murder Is Announced (1951):

“We old women always do snoop. It would be very odd and much more noticeable if I didn’t. Questions about mutual friends in different parts of the world and whether they remember so and so, and do they remember who it was that Lady Somebody’s daughter married? All that helps, doesn’t it?”

“Helps?” said the Inspector, rather stupidly.

“Helps to find out if people are who they say they are,” said Miss Marple.

People have often assumed that Miss Climpson is a Marple knock-off, but she isn’t: Unnatural Death appeared in October 1927, and Miss Marple first appeared in December of that year, in a story called “The Tuesday Night Club.” The first Marple novel is The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930. Neither writer copied the other, I am sure. But I don’t think that the appearance of the two characters at the same time is an accident. The emergence of the Modern Girl in the 1920s (successor to the New Woman) must have set people of Christie’s and Sayers’ generation — Christie was three years older than Sayers — thinking about how dramatically the potential roles for women had changed in their lifetime. They were too old to be Modern Girls, though they had been in some sense New Women, and as such had had opportunities that were unthinkable for women of the generation before them — except in the rare cases of heroic trailblazers like Jane Harrison and Mildred Pope, who simply created opportunities that had previously been nonexistent and thereby changed the world for the generations of women to come after them.

Moreover, the horrific death-toll of the Great War left several European societies with more marriageable women than men to marry them — thus creating the phenomenon of the “Superfluous Woman,” about whom Vera Brittain — someone I think of as a kind of double or mirror image of Sayers — wrote a moving poem. (Brittain did end up marrying and having children, one of whom was Shirley Williams, a co-founder of the Social Democratic Party.)

You get the sense that Miss Climpson — who is, generally speaking, of Mildred Pope’s generation — did not have that scholar’s great gifts, including the gift of an almost supernatural determination. Writing about a woman who had been born in the 1850s, around the time of Jane Harrison, Miss Climpson is full of admiration. (I pause here to note that Miss Climpson’s writing style is modeled on that of Queen Victoria, with so many underlinings and other instruments of emphasis that, as Lord Peter says, it looks like musical notation.)

It seems that, until five years ago, Miss Dawson lived in Warwickshire with her cousin, a Miss Clara Whittaker, Mary Whittaker’s great-aunt on the father’s side. This Miss Clara was evidently rather a ’character,’ as my dear father used to call it. In her day she was considered very ‘advanced’ and not quite nice(!) because she refused several good offers, cut her hair SHORT(!!) and set up in business for herself as a HORSE-BREEDER!!! Of course, nowadays, nobody would think anything of it, but then the old lady — or young lady as she was when she embarked on this revolutionary proceeding, was quite a PIONEER.

Miss Clara refuses to marry and instead lives with her closest friend, perhaps because she is a lesbian — “Lesbianism in Sayers” is a topic for another post — but it’s equally possible, I think, that her romantic feelings simply are not as strong as her desire for independence. When Miss Clara (born in 1850) was a young woman the first Married Women’s Property Act had been passed, but that would not have been enough to protect her from a husband who insisted on domination and control. And though Miss Climpson does not share this strong independent streak, and would herself have wanted to marry — Sayers says of her that she is “a spinster made and not born” — she nevertheless clearly admires the willpower and resourcefulness of Miss Clara.

It seems likely to me that Sayers in creating Miss Climpson and Christie in creating Miss Marple were, among many other things, thinking about what they might have been had they been born fifteen or twenty years earlier. Sayers in particular might not have been a “pioneer,” but was quick to claim the benefits that her academic pioneers had been able to secure for her. Perhaps, though, I shouldn’t say “secure”: because of the pioneers, Sayers was able to attend Somerville College, but Oxford was yet to grant degrees to Somervillians. She finished her studies in 1915 — with a First of course: she was quite a brilliant scholar, something too often forgotten — but could not receive her degree until five years later, when Oxford finally began recognizing the validity of its female students’ academic work. Harriet Vane, Sayers’s second-most-famous fictional creation, ten years younger than the author, would have finished at Shrewsbury College (a thinly fictionalized version of Somerville) around 1925 and taken her B.A. as a matter of course.

She would not, however, have been eligible to vote, nor would Sayers, though Miss Climpson and Mildred Pope would have had that right. Not until 1928 would all of them have had the franchise.

Had Sayers been the age of Miss Climpson, she almost certainly would not have attended university, would not have become a scholar and writer; had she been the age of Harriet Vane, she would have been faced with the opportunity to become a Modern Girl — something Harriet definitely isn’t, by the way. (Lord Peter’s um-friend Marjorie Phelps, whom we also see in multiple novels, is much closer to that type — which I think is why Lord Peter doesn’t marry her.) Decade by decade the status of women in British society was changing, and changing in multiple ways; the experience had to have been dizzying. We can see Sayers constantly reckoning with it in her fiction, and Christie too, though (I think) in less forthright and dramatic ways. Christie usually keeps the social commentary well in the background, except in her Mary Westmacott novels — Sayers firmly plants it front and center.