Marriage of Two Minds

 I long ago came under the spell of Dorthy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night. I second everything in Dorothy L. Sayers and the Enduring Legacy of a Marriage of True Minds, but I make note of the following:

Gaudy Night’s theme revolves around the choices women still find themselves torn between – the life of the mind, and that of the body, the single life and the married one. The poison pen in Gaudy Night turns out not to be a frustrated academic spinster but a widowed college cleaner, who blames one of the dons for her husband’s disgrace and suicide. Annie’s inability to value truth strikes a huge chord now that so many real-life women academics and writers like Professor Kathleen Stock and Helen Joyce find themselves embattled in the wars over gender in the very places where debate is most needed. However, Harriet, like Wimsey, grasps the essential point that truth must come above all personal feeling. It is in this world of intellectual integrity that Harriet understands she can “stand free and equal with Peter, since in that sphere she had never been false to her own standards.” They can, at last, marry.

 Looking back, it is not so easy to find another of a like mind. That does not mean that the search should stop for you who are not so old that it is death, not love, that looms large as a companion.

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