The Queens of Crime

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of gender discrimination, rape, sexual violence, graphic violence, and death.

In The Queens of Crime, the lives of Dorothy Sayers and May Daniels reflect the many challenges that women faced in early 20th-century Europe. Powerful men take advantage of both Dorothy and May, preying upon their vulnerability, and both struggle with the question of having children. As a young woman, Dorothy accepted social expectations for virginity in women and abstained from sex. The first man she loved abandoned her when she refused to have sex with him, and Dorothy was “heartbroken.” After the breakup, feeling “vulnerable and lonely,” she had “too many glasses of wine” (194), and a neighbor she barely knew pressured her into sex, resulting in a pregnancy. When the man learned of the pregnancy, he “ran for the hills […] never to be seen or heard from again” (210). This episode suggests that the father of Dorothy’s child, after taking advantage of her vulnerability, easily escaped responsibility and shame when she could not.

Similarly, powerful men preyed on May Daniels, with tragic results. In her final letter, May writes that she “naïvely accepted” her boyfriend Louis Williams’s desire for secrecy about their relationship and was “enraged and hurt” (232) when she learned he was married with a family.