Miss Mary Whittaker is a frigid, unapproachable, shockingly un-nurse-like nurse whose wealthy aunt has died unexpectedly, leaving her an enviable inheritance. In Unnatural Death, we know the murdererвЂ™s identity from the start - indeed, she sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb. In most Golden Age murder mysteries, we begin with a cast of colorful characters and intrude upon their lives and secrets until the murderer is revealed to be the most normal of the lot. Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club book cover.Д«ut itвЂ™s one of the least talked-about Sayers novels that most closely explores that old, stubborn question thatвЂ™s troubled doctors and politicians alike for centuries: вЂњAre women human?вЂќ In fact, Unnatural Death (1927), an early installment in the Lord Peter Wimsey series, is in essence a medical mystery as much as it is a murder mystery. It could hardly have been a surprise that such an unusual woman, given to unhealthy academic pursuits, would take up the profession of writing, not cookbooks or love stories, but crime novels and theology.Дorothy L. She attended OxfordвЂ™s Somerville College from 1912 to 1915, graduating with first class honors five years before the University allowed women to matriculate and earn degrees her MA, arriving in 1920, was half a decade late. ClarkeвЂ™s work but repeated and extended throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by countless writers, was surely familiar to Sayers, who was herself one of those unnatural, вЂњunderdevelopedвЂќ women Dr.

This argument, expressed most famously in Dr. They graduated from school or college excellent scholars, but with undeveloped ovaries. In those women who did venture into the halls of higher learning, he observed: the special mechanism we are speaking of remained germinal,вЂ“undeveloped. In Sex in Education, or, A Fair Chance for the Girls, he argued that while it was certainly possible, in strictly technical terms, for a woman to pursue an education equal to a manвЂ™s, it was hardly practical, since the development of the reproductive organs required energy and power that would be sapped away by hard study. Clarke of Harvard Medical College proposed quite a different answer to the question of the вЂњhumanityвЂќ of those women who, like Good Queen Bess, seem to pose a вЂњproblemвЂќ to medical understanding through their active engagement in pursuits previously reserved for men.

Sixty-five years before Sayers gave her 1938 speech, Dr. From the diagnosis of social unrest as hysteria to the defense of female murderers as victims of вЂњuterine insanity,вЂќ the ambiguous and dangerous qualities attached to the female body in medical history have always reflected concerns about the female body politic. SayersвЂ™s comments on the historical understanding of EnglandвЂ™s most beloved monarch hit upon a stubborn theme in medical history: the mystery of the female body as an allegory for deeper mysteries of gender.

She was a mystery, and must have some extraordinary solution. She was the tool of Burleigh, she was the tool of Leicester, she was the fool of Essex she was diseased, she was deformed, she was a man in disguise. They invented the most complicated and astonishing reasons both for her success as a sovereign and for her tortuous matrimonial policy. вЂњIt is extraordinarily entertaining,вЂќ she told her audience, to watch the historians of the past, for instance, entangling themselves in what they were pleased to call the вЂњproblemвЂќ of Queen Elizabeth.

In 1938, the British crime writer and theologian Dorothy Leigh Sayers addressed a womenвЂ™s society on the simple question: вЂњAre Women Human?вЂќ Adding her voice to the ongoing discourse on the вЂњwoman question,вЂќ Sayers expressed frustration with the wonder and criticism directed towards those people whose lives divert from the path expected of their gender.

Are women human dorothy sayers