I fully believe that you can't understand Unnatural Death without having read Clemence Dane's Regiment of Women- a Rant:
I'm not going to claim that the above is a remotely original observation- the only reason I ever heard of Regiment of Women is because I've seen it mentioned as the name of the book cited by Miss Climpson when she's writing to Wimsey referring to "Miss Clemence Dane’s very clever book on the subject" (the subject of what? I'll get back to that). I then read it, and basically it has completely changed the way that I read Unnatural Death in every way.
If you've been reading my posts here for a while you may recognize the name Clemence Dane- she and her friend (and Sayers's friend) Helen Simpson's book Enter Sir John was the subject of a post I did about its clear similarities with Strong Poison and my curiosity about Sayers's original intentions when using that plot. But Regiment of Women was written a decade before Enter Sir John, and, incidentally, a decade before The Well of Loneliness, the book (by Radclyffe Hall) often described as the first major lesbian novel. It was the first novel by Dane (pen name of Winifred Ashton) and an absolutely fascinating one. It's the kind of book that, as far as I can tell, is easily called "problematic representation" and yet has some absolutely fascinating elements that are so clearly reflected in Sayers's own treatment of relationships between women (and not just the central one) in Unnatural Death that it is crystal clear how influential it was.
I'm going to put the rest of this behind a spoiler warning, though I will say, the book is 110 years old and you can read it right here. Also warning for very dark themes, including suicide.
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I think the most important thing to be clear about is that Regiment of Women isn't quite a lesbian novel. It is a novel about abusively intimate relationships and power dynamics in an old-fashioned (even for 1917) boarding school that happens to feature at least one lesbian (but probably at least two). The long and short of it- Clare, a longstanding teacher at the school, draws a much younger teenage first-year teacher, Alwynne, into her clutches; they establish a very close and intimate relationship in which Alwynne is clearly subservient to Clare, and then Clare and Alwynne each separately form ultimately disastrous bonds with a young precocious student named Louise who is also drawn to and manipulated by Clare, spurring Louise's suicide. (More happens in the final third that I allude to below- I have a longer rant about the book here.)
Clare and Alwynne's relationship is a major theme and is established VERY early on in the book, which at that stage is a bit clunkily written. But they are clearly linked with each other- Alwynne is clearly devoted to Clare, and while Clare is a VERY problematic person who absolutely manipulates and emotionally abuses Alwynne, it's also very evident that she is extremely attached to Alwynne in her own right and loves Alwynne's presence and attention in her life in a way which comes across as very intimate. It's all extremely unhealthy, and while some scholars question whether it can really be read as lesbian, even if it was it is certainly not a good lesbian relationship. When Louise is added to the picture, it becomes murkier. The relationship between Alwynne and Louise is a largely wholesome mentor-mentee one; the one between Clare and Louise is completely toxic and manipulative. But both Alwynne and Louise each, separately, express something that feels to them like romantic love for Clare, explicitly comparing their love for her to the love that other women feel for men. Particularly in the case of Alwynne, Clare is right there with her- as toxic and emotionally abusive as she is to Alwynne, she also clearly sees herself as Alwynne's life partner, promises that they can adopt children if Alwynne wants, travels with her, plans their lives together, and angrily tells Alwynne's aunt that unlike a husband, she wouldn't make Alwynne give up a career she's talented at for love, as the man who the aunt wants Alwynne to marry would.
At this point I presume it's more or less clear that Mary Whittaker in Unnatural Death seems clearly meant to be an allusion to Clare, with Vera Findlater serving in a role that combines Alwynne's and Louise's. The parallels are inexact and the characters of Mary and Clare are quite different in their personalities, but neither is able to truly give emotionally, at the same time that they inspire love in other women which they are happy to take. When Miss Climpson talks to Vera about her relationship with Mary, it is this that she points out as the most worrying thing:
“But a great friendship does make demands,” cried Miss Findlater eagerly. “It’s got to be just everything to one. It’s wonderful the way it seems to colour all one’s thoughts. Instead of being centred in oneself, one’s centred in the other person. That’s what Christian love means—one’s ready to die for the other person.” “Well, I don’t know,” said Miss Climpson. “I once heard a sermon about that from a most splendid priest—and he said that that kind of love might become idolatry if one wasn’t very careful. He said that Milton’s remark about Eve—you know, ‘he for God only, she for God in him’—was not congruous with Catholic doctrine. One must get the proportions right, and it was out of proportion to see everything through the eyes of another fellow-creature.” “One must put God first, of course,” said Miss Findlater, a little formally. “But if the friendship is mutual—that was the point—quite unselfish on both sides, it must be a good thing.” “Love is always good, when it’s the right kind,” agreed Miss Climpson, “but I don’t think it ought to be too possessive. One has to train oneself—” she hesitated, and went on courageously—“and in any case, my dear, I cannot help feeling that it is more natural—more proper, in a sense—for a man and woman to be all in all to one another than for two persons of the same sex. Er—after all, it is a—a fruitful affection,” said Miss Climpson, boggling a trifle at this idea, “and—and all that, you know, and I am sure that when the right MAN comes along for you—” “Bother the right man!” cried Miss Findlater, crossly. “I do hate that kind of talk. It makes one feel dreadful—like a prize cow or something. Surely, we have got beyond that point of view in these days.”
For all that the quite proper religious Christian Miss Climpson no doubt does believe that heterosexual relationships are right in a way that homosexual ones are not, her expression of this feels much more reflexive than her prior point, which is clearly heartfelt and carefully considered. The problem with Mary Whittaker is less that she is a woman and more that she is manipulative and a user, and that Vera isn't in a relationship of equals but rather is alarming in its subservience.
(Parenthetically, I feel like the "one has to train oneself-" line is FASCINATING because I can see it meaning multiple different things and, as with all of Sayers, I refuse to only go with the one I presume she meant.)
The same thing happens in Regiment of Women- Roger, the Ideal Love Interest who crops up in the last third (he is such a stereotype that Alwynne mockingly calls him Mr Darcy), tries to convince Alwynne that her relationship with Clare is uneven and that he will treat her better. Even when Alwynne concedes this, she is pretty much unable to conceive of loving Roger (anything romantic he does to her she imagines as being outside her body in some way, with "the tulips" reacting, not her). She is clear that she likes Roger and appreciates his treatment of her, but what she feels for Clare is love. When Roger gently kisses Alwynne on the forehead, she mentally compares it to Clare kissing Alwynne hard and possessively on the lips, trying to decide which she prefers.
What is fascinating about Regiment of Women is that while it has basically no healthy depiction of women in a mutually healthy loving relationship, it doesn't depict healthy heterosexual love either. Roger loves Alwynne, but he can be manipulative and in his own way wants to control her through marriage, which he concedes would provide her with much less freedom. Alwynne never once says that she loves Roger, not even after she agrees to marry him- at the end of the book, after finally breaking with Clare, Alwynne thinks of Roger only as "safety" and her words to him when she sees him are "You were right. I was wrong. It's you I want. I will do everything you want, always. I've been simply miserable. Oh, Roger—be good to me." Italics are mine- emphasizing that this is Alwynne choosing someone who is kind and will care for her over someone who will be toxic and consistently neg her. A very reasonable choice if seen as a binary, but one that is not love- and one that immediately disappears Alwynne from the narrative. It is the last thing we see her say.
What the book seems to be saying is that what is toxic about Clare and Alwynne's relationship is not that they are both women but that Clare is a horrible person who is using Alwynne for her own benefit. Unnatural Death does the same, to the nth degree, with Mary Whittaker and Vera Findlater- and goes a step further by showing what could have been in Agatha Dawson and Clara Whittaker's relationship. They are a couple who are equal, loving, and beloved- they got the proportions right. If Mary Whittaker had been a different kind of person, who's to say that she and Vera couldn't have been happy? And, in the single Miss Climpson, is Sayers showing that Alwynne didn't have to choose between Clare and Roger but could have self-actualized on her own? (This can feel a bit of a stretch, but I find the thought interesting.)
I'm not sure when Dorothy L Sayers met Clemence Dane, but by a few years after Unnatural Death was written they certainly knew each other as members of the Detection Club. Sayers was by her own account heterosexual but had a number of close friends who were lesbians- one of whom, Muriel St Clair Byrne, co-wrote with her the Busman's Honeymoon play which Sayers later novelized. Regardless of Sayers's own feelings about lesbians, she does seem to have read Clemence Dane attentively and to have understood what Dane was trying to say. Dane herself, as someone who herself had live-in relationships with women (she dedicated this book to her live-in partner Elsie Arnold), must have needed to be cautious, and added a lot of often-dubious passages about men vs women and whether Alwynne's immaturity is responsible for her devotion to Clare. Sayers, married to a man and writing popular mystery fiction, could take Dane's message a step farther, a year before Radclyffe Hall published the extremely controversial The Well of Loneliness, and receive zero pushback for doing so.
