incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

No, there can be cross-gender self-insertion - that was an early-morning error on my part - I suspect I was thinking about the original definition of Mary Sues and confounding it with the felt bias against female authors. After having written a whole post on how I do little self-insertion bits into all my characters, too. Bleah.

On your other comment - because I don't feel like scattering my replies - I'm sure someone has refuted the "falling in love" accusation, and I know that recently ajhalluk mentioned she was planning to write a post on the idea, regarding Wimsey. Perhaps we ought to encourage her. My take on it, to be really simplistic, is that Dunnett wanted everyone to fall in love with Lymond, but didn't necessarily take that step herself (it's hard to tell), and Sayers was quite consciously, in the early books, indulging in wish-fulfillment via Wimsey (the cars and the books and the wine and so forth), but knew him too well as a person by the time Harriet came on the scene to be "falling" in love in the sense people seem to mean it. One does kind of hope authors love their protagonists; I think it makes for more readable books.