Women Writers and Conservative Sensibilities

Three short pieces examine different kinds of conservatism in the work of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Anita Brookner and Joanna Trollope. Reviewing the television versions of Christie in the 1990s, I argue that they played down her modernity, opting instead for a nostalgia absent from the novels. Sayers’s far more Tory visions of England are then discussed. By way of a contrast, I raise two cheers for the liberalism of Merchant Ivory films, often accused of conservatism. And in the final piece, I take issue with the limitations of class sensibilities in the novels of Brookner and Trollope.