Very nicely said, and I agree with you that I don't blame Lady Hilda for not sharing everything about her past, I don't think she owed that to her husband before marrying him. And I do have sympathy with her fear and the fact that she was being blackmailed. But, I lose a lot of that sympathy when I see that she was willing to do (and to cover up) worse things in the present than she had done in the past. That, to me, poses a serious problem for her marriage, and one which the story does not resolve. I feel like the story expects me to think that, by the end of the tale, everything is basically fine, which...is not how I feel.
She must have realised that the letter was important. But I think spying and passing information is mainly about keeping a stalemate--I don’t think she could have been expected to realise that the letter was going to probably lead to a terrible war.
Well, I grant you that probably no one would leap instantly to the idea that this bit of info was going to immediately throw their country into war, that is a pretty extreme scenario and she does seem to have been blindsided by the strength of her husband's anguish on his discovery of the loss. But as to most spying being about stalemates...on the one hand, if the argument is that she knows nothing about politics, then she would have had no reason to think the stolen document was just going to contribute to some continuing stalemate. On the other hand, if she does know enough to have some conception of what international spying and the balance of powers in Europe are about, then she can't really take the, 'I'm a woman, I couldn't possibly have known what I was doing!' line. That's a line of defense that annoys me, personally. I agree that intelligent women were not encouraged to follow politics and I would agree that if, for example, she couldn't name the major parties in Parliament or couldn't find Afghanistan on a map or things like that I would accept that as a reasonable outgrowth of society pressures and uneven female education. But when your husband carries sensitive government documents around in a locked box with him, and a blackmailer describes one for you to steal, I really don't think you are justified in assuming that it probably won't do any real harm to your husband or your country for you to take it. Being a woman does not justify that assumption. Also, it's clear that she didn't even read the document herself before handing it over (she asks Holmes what the letter was about), so clearly she didn't *want* to know what exactly she was doing. To me, that's not naivete, that's willful ignorance and a refusal to take responsibility for what she was doing. For all she knew, she could have been handing over material with which to blackmail the Prime Minister, or the formula for a new chemical weapon, or really anything at all. She preferred not to know.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2015-11-02 05:11 pm (UTC)She must have realised that the letter was important. But I think spying and passing information is mainly about keeping a stalemate--I don’t think she could have been expected to realise that the letter was going to probably lead to a terrible war.
Well, I grant you that probably no one would leap instantly to the idea that this bit of info was going to immediately throw their country into war, that is a pretty extreme scenario and she does seem to have been blindsided by the strength of her husband's anguish on his discovery of the loss. But as to most spying being about stalemates...on the one hand, if the argument is that she knows nothing about politics, then she would have had no reason to think the stolen document was just going to contribute to some continuing stalemate. On the other hand, if she does know enough to have some conception of what international spying and the balance of powers in Europe are about, then she can't really take the, 'I'm a woman, I couldn't possibly have known what I was doing!' line. That's a line of defense that annoys me, personally. I agree that intelligent women were not encouraged to follow politics and I would agree that if, for example, she couldn't name the major parties in Parliament or couldn't find Afghanistan on a map or things like that I would accept that as a reasonable outgrowth of society pressures and uneven female education. But when your husband carries sensitive government documents around in a locked box with him, and a blackmailer describes one for you to steal, I really don't think you are justified in assuming that it probably won't do any real harm to your husband or your country for you to take it. Being a woman does not justify that assumption. Also, it's clear that she didn't even read the document herself before handing it over (she asks Holmes what the letter was about), so clearly she didn't *want* to know what exactly she was doing. To me, that's not naivete, that's willful ignorance and a refusal to take responsibility for what she was doing. For all she knew, she could have been handing over material with which to blackmail the Prime Minister, or the formula for a new chemical weapon, or really anything at all. She preferred not to know.