Harriet Vane is the only daughter of a country doctor. She was an undergraduate at Shrewsbury College, Oxford (based on Sayers' own Somerville College, the location of which is given as the Balliol College Sports Grounds, now partly occupied by a residential annexe, on Holywell Street) and took a First in English. Her parents both died while she was quite young and she was left to make her own fortune at the age of 23. She has had some success as a writer of detective stories, living and socialising with other artists in Bloomsbury. She begins a relationship with Philip Boyes, a more literary but far less successful writer who professes not to believe in marriage, and she agrees to live with him without marrying. After a year of this arrangement, Boyes believes that she truly loves him and proposes marriage. Angered by his hypocrisy and aghast at being offered marriage as "a bad-conduct prize", Harriet breaks off the relationship.