#prob the most depressing one bc it was an unknowing premonition of her then-still-happy marriage is

[o-uncle-newt]

(Ramble on why I think so below the cut- warning for strong opinions lol:)

I love The Nine Tailors (though it took time to make me love it, I won't lie- I tend to zone out during the change-ringing description bits). But I do not love Hilary Thorpe, I think the parts of the book with her in them are tonally out of place, and I think that the reason why this is true is because she's Sayers's most indulgent/unrepentant expy. I think it's true both on a purely book level, but also in terms of Sayers's actual biography.

First I'll note on a purely book level- Harriet might literally have Wimsey fall in love with her, but she has to go through a lot and change a lot to actually get with him. (Not to change for him, but just to grow somewhat as a person.) Miss Meteyard is probably the most "neutral" major Sayers expy, and possibly the one most true to life, but it's an important element of her place in the story that she doesn't get Wimsey at the end. Hilary though... it's basically a Daddy Long Legs without the creepy bit at the end where he marries her. Yes, her story in the book starts with tragedy, but she literally gets left two fortunes and has the admiration and patronage of a lord, and it's not subtly portrayed. It feels like it was painted in with a very broad and bold brush, unlike so much of the rest of the book which is very subtle in its human emotions and relationships.

She has that element to her which is probably the most indulgent thing for a certain kind of person, who my guess is includes a lot of the people who read Sayers (I'm certainly one of them)- she's a precocious teen and an adult- not just any adult, but a titled and brilliant one- recognizes her precocity and upcoming greatness (even without a whole lot of evidence) and celebrates her for them. There's a common trope in middle grade books of kids who are really talented or precocious in some way and make an impact in the adult world- think Roald Dahl or Andrew Clements, off the top of my head- and another genre, for young women a bit older, where it's specifically that that attention is quasi- (or actually!) romantic but in an unthreatening way that emphasizes both the character's precocity despite her youth and the fact that it's an adult who is older and has made their (usually his) way in the world who recognizes it. Let's say more of a Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm than a Daddy Long Legs, then.

To be clear- there is nothing inherently wrong with this kind of plot! Like I said, I loved that kind of thing when I was a kid, and to be honest I like it as an adult too. But usually, these books require the child/young woman in question to have internal development as part of the journey and part of the world building of what makes the character both sympathetic and precocious. The Nine Tailors doesn't really do that- Hilary has to live with great tragedy at the start of the book, but her own development as a person, and honestly our knowledge of her as a person, is relatively limited. She basically is how she is and Wimsey is (semi-paternally) into that because the way she is-precocious and somewhat aloof- is obviously awesome and she also ends up with a gazillion dollars and the emeralds. In terms of how Wimsey reacts to her, she's like mini-Harriet- but Harriet has to work for it somewhat. Not for Wimsey's affection for her, but for the richness of character that makes us care about Wimsey's affection for her.

So anyway, doesn't really work for me, and feels very out of place and garish in an otherwise intricately-painted book IMO. But also, I think it becomes even more blatant when you read about Cat O'Mary and Sayers's unfinished memoir.

So basically, sometime in the early 30s Sayers started writing a memoir, which she called My Edwardian Childhood. The funny part is she never made it to the actual Edwardian period- it only took her to about age five, when Victoria was still on the throne- but (though I've never read it- I do want to get my hands on it) it ends up being an account of her early years in Oxford and then the move to the fens, which she saw in retrospect as cutting her off from intelligent society in a way which stunted her. Having made it up to that move to East Anglia, she got so into the overall vibe of the location that she decided to put the memoir aside and work on a labor of love dedicated to this atmosphere of her upbringing- The Nine Tailors.

So, basically, Sayers got the idea for this book while doing some deep musings about her own childhood in that area, and while she was starting to critically think about what she was like as a child. We know that Sayers used real names of people from her childhood for the character names in The Nine Tailors, and it's said that Venables is based on her father. Why would it be a surprise that Hilary Thorpe might be based on her?

Once Sayers was done with The Nine Tailors, she started a totally different book- a semi-autobiographical novel, unrelated to the Wimsey novels, called Cat O'Mary. The main character, based on herself, was named Katherine rather than Dorothy, but her letters as well as biographical details match up enough for us to know that the account of her childhood is VERY aligned with what it was actually like for her. And, in fact, she goes into a lot of detail about what she was like- but with a much more critical eye on herself than she had in her memoir. She talks about having "developed all the faults and peculiarities of an only child whose entire life is spent among grown-up people. She was self-absorbed, egotistical, timid, priggish and, in a mild sort of way, disobedient." And honestly, even when you read a biography of her, or her collected letters from her childhood, that is something of the image of her as a young, precocious, coddled child that one gets (she was the only daughter of a minister who grew up very insulated and as the center of attention, playing only with children "imported" for her, more or less). Sayers never finished Cat O'Mary, and it's not 100% clear why- but it's hypothesized that it's because the overall point of the book in her mind was to convey the message that, by then, she'd already decided to include in Gaudy Night (through the eyes of another expy lol).

I feel a bit as though Hilary Thorpe is Sayers as she'd have written of herself in that more idealized memoir of hers- with perhaps a tad more wish fulfilment than she'd have given herself in that, but then again isn't that was Wimsey is for? And I wonder whether it's only after writing this ideal and beloved version of herself as a child, with the nostalgia that came from writing about the place she grew up in and in the frame of mind that led to her memoir, that she buckled down to actually engage with what that kind of precocious child who she was might have actually been like, how she really was/would have been accepted by adults, etc. With all the real life parallels between Hilary's personality and Sayers's, and the contrast between the somewhat twee idealization of Hilary and the more acerbic (and AFAIK more accurate to Sayers IRL, who was by many accounts a tough cookie, including from people who said it positively) portrayal of Katherine, it can be hard for me to really enjoy Hilary without a healthy dose of eye-rolling.

But like, the rest of the book is awesome so who cares?