While in some ways a return to less philosophical themes after The Nine Tailors and Gaudy Night (1935), Busman 's Honeymoon is at heart profoundly concerned with the partnership of man and woman. Sayers had delayed the marriage of Harriet Vane to Lord Peter in the three previous novels in which both characters appear in order to emphasize the necessary equality of the sexes. While some critics have objected that Harriet defers to Lord Peter too much and fails to assert her bold feminist personhood, such readers miss Sayers's point. At the beginning of the series in Strong Poison (1930), Harriet is precisely feminist in this rigid, man-rejecting way. But Sayers sees the importance of woman's independence as part of the larger social fabric of interaction of the sexes through mutual respect and with awareness of their different strengths and abilities. In Busman's Honeymoon Harriet and Peter discuss...