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8 years ago @ The Toast - On Harriet Vane and Lo... · 2 replies · +17 points

Yes! " -and no shabby tigers, either."

8 years ago @ The Toast - On Harriet Vane and Lo... · 1 reply · +22 points

Oh yes! There are so many versions of this in the novel, and I love them all, but my favorite is the little plotline with young St. George, who is a defamiliarized Peter - intelligent, handsome, wealthy, entitled, but also frivolous, youthful, and shameless. Peter's anxiety that she'll prefer St. George, Harriet's realization that St. George makes her feel maternal...

And Reggie Pomfret! Who is much the same as St. George, but is actually available because he's not a Wimsey. Okay, I have got to stop.

I do not want to stop.

8 years ago @ The Toast - On Harriet Vane and Lo... · 4 replies · +32 points

You're so right about how signposty it is. My theory about why it's so effective is that most of Peter's transformation (and Wilfred's too, as Harriet and Peter soon discuss) is to do with emotional depth and early trauma. He starts out as a brain on legs, and gradually she shades in all of the PTSD, the ambiguous feelings toward his calling, his awkward relationship with his social status, etc. etc. She really does leave out his physicality, though, or at least she leaves out Harriet's recognition of his physicality - as this essay so rightly points out.

And so this scene works because in the middle of a novel that is ALL BRAINS, ALL THE TIME, suddenly, Harriet sees his body. That passage is a really, really long list of all of the things she notices about his body, and both of their responses to it are powerfully physical. This is also why I find Busman's Honeymoon so fun - they get to have bodies!

8 years ago @ The Toast - On Harriet Vane and Lo... · 0 replies · +23 points

YES. Sends chills down my spine even now.

8 years ago @ The Toast - On Harriet Vane and Lo... · 15 replies · +63 points

This is lovely, and the consideration of Harriet's gaze really is crucial to the way the entire relationship unfolds, and it feels so unique to this series, for this period of mystery writing. I just have to add, of course, the VERY BEST and MOST EXCITING moment of female gazing, when they've parked the punt along the riverbank and Harriet watches as Peter examines her case book. There's a lengthy paragraph where Harriet details all of the most minute features of his profile ("the gleam of gold down on the cheekbone," "the slight sun-reddening of the fair skin," "the little hollow above the points of the collarbone"), and then he looks up and sees her staring at him.

"So, thought Harriet, it has happened." The most chaste, and most romantic romance scene of my adolescence.

10 years ago @ The Toast - Sorting 19th Century B... · 0 replies · +4 points

Oh no, that is supposed to be a link! See, for instance, here: http://www.wilkie-collins.info/home_gloucester.ht... or here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/1991/nov/21/biog...

10 years ago @ The Toast - When To Give A Kid A B... · 8 replies · +4 points

Austen feels so inevitable - what age is safe??

10 years ago @ The Toast - Happy Birthday, Joni M... · 0 replies · +14 points

I vividly remember playing Blue in my room in high school - my mom came in and said, "Wait, what are you doing? This was *my* adolescence!"

10 years ago @ The Toast - Happy Birthday, Joni M... · 1 reply · +10 points

Not always clear about whether or not I have a religion, but if I do, Joni Mitchell is one of the central tenets.

10 years ago @ The Toast - How Not To Take The GR... · 0 replies · +5 points

It's true! This may also be a problem if you have, say, a Dutch last name with a von or a van stuck in there at the beginning!

My standard ETS rant has always been about how absurd the English subject test is, but it is totally going to be the names thing now. It is so unbelievably, bafflingly shameful.

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