Searching for a room of one’s own: The precarious subjectivities of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers

Consistent with the call for papers, this study adds to the body of work on processes of precaritization using a micro-historical/biographical approach to examine the subjective, embodied experiences of two female authors who lived through a dramatic transformation in institutionalized conditions, i.e., the partial dismantling of institutionalized patriarchy in the UK in the early 20th century precipitated by first wave feminists. By moving beyond the focus on the “standard employment model” to include institutional structures that affect marriage, women’s control over their bodies and care and guardianship of children, this study examines how this transformation of the male breadwinner model precaritized middle class women who had previously been actively discouraged, both legally and culturally, from working. While Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers were two women born into the same conditions of legal patriarchy in Britain in the 1890s, differences in their embodied correspondence with patriarchal notions of female attractiveness produced very different expectations and life experiences. The availability of letters and autobiography offers a rare window into the subjective, embodied experiences of these two women as they struggled to navigate this sudden “emancipation” and the new expectation that they should be economically independent as it unfolded over their lifetimes. Finally, the body of writing they left as authors of detective fiction offers some insight into how, even though they distanced themselves from the feminist movement of the time, they also subtly resisted by ventriloquizing alternatives to patriarchal gender regimes in their fiction.