The following contains
spoilers from The Woman in Red, Episode 2 of Miss Scarlet & the Duke. For a non-spoilery read, check out Salon s review.
On Sunday s episode of the Masterpiece mystery series Miss Scarlet & the Duke, tenacious sleuth Eliza Scarlet (Kate Phillips) learns that her former suitor and now business investor Rupert Parker (Andrew Gower) is a self-styled like-minded fellow.
While today s viewers may immediately comprehend Rupert s meaning, it s not until he refers to a man whose taste does not lie with women that Eliza understands. Despite being a sharp and progressive detective, the sheltered Victorian young woman probably only at that moment realized that a person could be gay. (Despite the popularity of Victorian-set romance novels, women of the time were not expected to think about sex at all, and the terms homosexual and heterosexual weren t in use at the time.) It s part of Eliza s awakening to life s realities that began with inheriting her fa