ABSTRACT
Alfred Tennyson's works were often singled out as exemplifying the worst of the previous century. Rather than being swept away with the "abandonment" and "rapture" created by Tennyson's poetry as Woolf claims their predecessors were, modernist critics generally worked to distance themselves from his poetry and attempted to interpret it with dispassionate, objective interest. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Dorothy L. Sayers respected Tennyson's works and found value in a number of his supposedly Victorian ideas. Rather than assuming that Tennyson is hopelessly Victorian and dismissing the majority of his ideas as irrelevant to a more modern society, Sayers grapples with his essentially Victorian project and recognizes how intensely important his message is for her own society. Given the lingering power of these gender stereotypes, it is not surprising that Sayers, like Tennyson, focuses much of her story on discovering what particular balance between masculinity and femininity might work to create a good marriage and their process is remarkably similar.
