Harriet Vane - Character Biography

Character Biography

Harriet Vane is the daughter of a country doctor. She takes a First in English at the fictional Shrewsbury College, Oxford (the location of which is given as the Balliol College Sports Grounds, now partly occupied by a residential annexe, on Holywell Street). Her parents both die while she is quite young and she is left to make her own fortune at the age of twenty-three. She has some success as a writer of detective stories, living and socialising with other artists in Bloomsbury. In time she falls for Philip Boyes, a more literary writer (but with fewer sales) who professes not to believe in marriage, and she agrees to live with him without marrying. After a year of this arrangement, Boyes believes that she truly loves him and proposes marriage. Angered by his hypocrisy and aghast at being offered marriage as "a bad-conduct prize", Harriet breaks off the relationship.

Boyes dies soon afterwards of arsenic poisoning — the method Harriet had researched for her new book. She is arrested and tried for murdering Boyes. Wimsey comes to her rescue by proving who really poisoned Boyes.

After Harriet is acquitted, she remains quite notorious. Sales of her books skyrocket. Wimsey continues to pursue her romantically, but Harriet repeatedly declines marriage on the principle that gratitude is not a good basis for marriage. She decides to take a walking tour to relax, during which she stumbles over a corpse on a beach, adding to her notoriety. The press is naturally interested; Wimsey hastens to the scene, after receiving a tip from a journalist friend, to help shield Harriet from suspicion. The two investigate the death (when they are not romantically sparring) and unmask the murderer.

A few years later, in 1935, Harriet returns to Oxford for a reunion (or Gaudy) and is asked to investigate some strange occurrences at her old college. She protests that she is not a sleuth, and recommends that the college hire professional detectives. However, failing to reach either Miss Climpson, at the female detective agency set up by Wimsey, or Wimsey himself, she agrees to assist the college. Her cover is research into Sheridan Le Fanu, an Anglo-Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels of the 19th century. (In Thrones, Dominations, the Author's Note states that Vane published a monograph on Sheridan Le Fanu in 1946.) After months of data gathering but with no resolution in sight, Harriet turns once again to Wimsey for help. By the end of the book the villain has been unmasked and Harriet has finally accepted Wimsey's proposal.

The press is delighted to have a woman once accused of murder engaged to a duke's son, and happily publicises the fact. Wimsey and Vane have a small wedding in Oxford with no notice to the press, and escape to their new country residence, Talboys, a Tudor farmhouse in North Hertfordshire which Harriet had admired as a child and which Peter had given her as a wedding present. The body of the former owner is discovered in the cellar, leading them to investigate.

Thrones, Dominations, a novel abandoned by Sayers and finished by Jill Paton Walsh, is set in and around London, shortly after they return from their honeymoon.

The first of their children is born in the story "The Haunted Policeman".

By the time of the short story "Talboys", they have three sons: Bredon Delagardie Peter Wimsey (born in October 1936), Roger Wimsey (born 1938), and Paul Wimsey (born 1940). Chronologically between the two are "The Wimsey Papers", a series of epistolary articles written at the beginning of World War II, which Sayers wrote for The Spectator. Jill Paton Walsh referenced "The Wimsey Papers" in writing A Presumption of Death, set at the beginning of the Second World War, in which Harriet takes a leading role. Sayers told friends orally that Harriet and Peter Wimsey were to have five children in all, though she did not disclose the names and sexes of the two youngest children.