Chapter 1: What is the significance of Lady Chatterley and Miss Marple's literary origins?
A hundred years ago this year, Lady Chatterley was born, soon appearing in D.H. Lawrence's highly controversial novel Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1928. Another very famous female literary character was born at almost exactly the same time, Miss Marple, who made her debut in 1927.
Lawrence's novel became famous for its detailed descriptions of the passionate affair between Connie Chatterley and Mellors the Gamekeeper. In many countries, including the US and the UK, it wasn't publishable in its unedited form for at least another 30 years.
Miss Marple might not seem to have much in common with the adulterous young wife of Sir Clifford Chatterley, but are the Miss Marple stories as chaste as they seem? Or is sex to be found lurking within them? Welcome to She Done It. I'm Caroline Crampton. But today it's not me that's taking you back a hundred years to these seismic literary moments of the 1920s.
My husband Guy Cuthbertson is in charge of this one.
I'll let him explain further. Agatha Christie was once a great admirer of D.H. Lawrence's work, according to the autobiography that she wrote towards the end of her life. All those years later, she recalled how Lawrence influenced her first attempts to write stories. She was not alone in that. Lawrence was an influence on many writers, especially when they were young.
Born in 1885, only five years before Christie, and publishing his first novels before the First World War and then through the 1920s until his death in 1930, Lawrence was a new and influential voice in fiction at the time of the Golden Age. and references to his work do appear in Golden Age detective fiction. Cecil Day-Lewis is an example.
He refers to Lady Chatterley's lover several times in the detective stories he wrote as Nicholas Blake. In A Question of Proof, in 1935, a character called Gadsby is looking for a book in the lockers in the common room at a school, and another character called Tiverton tells him to keep his nose out of his locker. So Gadsby replies, got Lady Chatterley tucked away in there, have you?
In There's Trouble Brewing, two years later, there's a character called Miss Mellors, Later, Day-Lewis would name a character Charles Blair Chatterley in End of Chapter in 1957 and also use the name of the Chatterley home, Ragby, in his Christmas story The Sad Variety in 1964, which is about a Professor Alfred Ragby whose daughter is kidnapped.
Day-Lewis was a witness at the famous Chatterley trial in London in 1960, where a variety of famous writers were called upon to defend the book with the result that the publishers Penguin were able to publish the unexpurgated edition. Day-Lewis reportedly caused some excitement when he admitted to the court that yes, he was also Nicholas Blake, the writer of detective stories.
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Chapter 2: How did D.H. Lawrence influence Agatha Christie?
And come and hang out with your homegirls. Woohoo!
In 1939, in an article called The Chastity of Murderers in The Tatler, the writer Michael Arlen complained about the unrealistic chastity of the characters in Agatha Christie's books. He felt that they don't have sex lives. He said, "...the unassailable chastity of all these people is getting a bit too thick altogether."
He said that in fiction of the 1930s, people were regularly jumping into bed with each other, especially in books set in the countryside. Incidentally, Arlen is often identified as the inspiration for the character Michaelis in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Michaelis has an affair with Milady before the Gamekeeper does.
The countryside has a very amorous effect on the characters in modern novels, he says, but no such action occurs in Murder Mysteries. According to Arlen, there is not even an arch hint of zizzy pom-pom. Not even for what he calls the girl with all the earmarks of a pretty hot number. Married couples make us wonder whether they have done anything constructive.
In Agatha Christie's fiction, he says, they grimly sleep alone. That unusual word of Arlen's, zizzy pom-pom, which he had introduced in the Tatler a month before, is not used by Christie as far as I know, although John Dixon Carr would later use it in his fiction. But was Arlen fair to Agatha Christie?
We look at the Marple books and we see that there is sexual content, rather a lot of it, but it is veiled and politely dealt with. rather intriguing to see how Christie deals with this. It's not chaste, there's plenty of filth, but we could hardly notice it. Sex as a word does occasionally occur, early on in the story The Herb of Death in 1930, or later in A Murder Is Announced in 1950.
where sex was a fad? After the war we went in for sex, now it's all frustration? Or in 1962's The Mirror Cracked from Side to Side, we are told that Marina Gregg was a film star before the modern obsession with curviness and vital statistics, even though in the film version she is played by Elizabeth Taylor.
We are told that she could not have been described as sex incarnate, or the bust, or the torso. She is the tall, thin, bony beauty like a garbo. She gave her films personality rather than mere sex.
In A Caribbean Mystery two years later, we learn that sex as a word had not been mentioned in Miss Marple's young days, but there had been plenty of it, not talked about so much, but enjoyed far more than nowadays, or so it seemed to her. Marple recalls that sex was called sin once upon a time, but now it was a kind of duty.
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Chapter 3: What are the contrasting themes of sexuality in Lady Chatterley’s Lover vs. Miss Marple stories?
There are links to all the books and stories referenced in the episode description and at shedoneitshow.com slash Lady Chatterley versus Miss Marple. I also publish transcripts of every episode, including this one. Find them all at shedoneitshow.com. If you'd like to stay in touch with the podcast between episodes, sign up for the weekly She Done It newsletter at shedoneitshow.com.
It's the best way to get more murder mystery reading recommendations and to know what's coming up on the podcast before anyone else. She Done It is edited by Ewan McAleese and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith. Thanks for listening.