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Record W2023587528 · doi:10.3138/md.44.2.214

The Anti-Romantic Comedies of Dorothy L. Sayers

2001· article· en· W2023587528 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Martha Greene Eads

Bibliographic record

VenueModern Drama · 2001
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicContemporary Literature and Criticism
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsRomanceLiteratureDreamChivalryPlot (graphics)HistoryArtPsychoanalysisPsychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

"[W]hat on earth do women want?" Dorothy L. Sayers imagines men asking in her 1938 essay "Are Women Human?" Her answer is unequivocal: “I do not know that women, as women, want anything in particular, but as human beings they want, my good men, exactly what you want yourselves: interesting occupation, reasonable freedom for their pleasures, and a sufficient emotional outlet". Many of Sayers's readers may suspect her of having created detective novelist Harriet Vane to embody her dream of a life that features satisfying work, creature comforts, and a passionate marriage. As the love interest Sayers developed for detective Lord Peter Wimsey, Harriet Vane illustrates the possibility of an intelligent woman's finding happiness in both her work and her marriage to a wealthy and interesting man. As Harriet develops from the damsel in distress in the novel Strong Poison (1930) into a successful writer and amateur sleuth in Have His Carcase (1932) and proves capable of serious scholarship in Gaudy Night (1935), her relationship with Lord Peter resembles the standard romance plot Janice Radway develops in Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Although the Vane-Wimsey romance depicted in the novels follows the romance trajectory Radway traces, Sayers veers from that path in Busman's Honeymoon (1937), her play about the first stage of the couple's marriage. This essay examines Sayers's use of that play and her next, Love All, to question the literary and cultural convention of romantic love. As she transplants Lord Peter and Harriet Vane from the page to the stage in Busman's Honeymoon, Sayers sows the seeds of anti-romanticism that bloom in Love All (1940). Moving away from the conventional courtship plot of the first three Vane-Wimsey novels, Sayers uses her early plays to assert the value of meaningful work, mutual respect, and loving service beyond the realm of romance.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.008
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.012
Threshold uncertainty score0.025

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.008
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0120.011
Scholarly communication0.0060.004
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0020.007
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.002

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.021
GPT teacher head0.224
Teacher spread0.203 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations7
Published2001
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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