This week, our selection from the Classic Mysteries Vault is a Golden Age book that seems to attract controversy and strong opinions both for and against it. The book is Gaudy Night, one of Dorothy L. Sayers's stories about Lord Peter Wimsey - and, perhaps more importantly, about Harriet Vane, who does her own share of investigating a rather ugly campaign of harassment aimed at what were, at the time, some of the earliest Oxford's female scholars. Personally, I have always enjoyed the book, and I'm just going to step back here and let you read what I had to say about the book when I did an audio review of Gaudy Night for the Classic Mysteries podcast about a decade ago. I have done some editing, mostly for clarification.
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To put it mildly, the situation was simply intolerable. The respectable scholars of the first women’s college at Oxford University dedicated to – and populated solely by – women were under attack. Someone was sending nasty, belittling letters to the female dons and woman scholars. Someone was playing unpleasant, even dangerous tricks, apparently in the hope of ruining the school’s reputation among the Oxford community. That learned community had no idea how to proceed. So they turned to a distinguished alumna, Harriet Vane for help – and, through her, to Lord Peter Wimsey. It happens in Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers.
It is a little hard to believe, given the prominent and distinguished role of women in higher education today, that it has been less than a century since women were first admitted as full members to, and became eligible for degrees from, Oxford University in England, one of the world’s oldest and most distinguished centers of learning. Among the first women to receive degrees from Oxford was Dorothy L. Sayers, who would go on to write her immensely popular and influential mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey – and, in four of them, create and develop another marvelous character, Harriet Vane, an Oxford-educated woman and a successful mystery novelist. Any parallel between Harriet Vane and her creator, Dorothy L. Sayers, of course, must be strictly coincidental.
In the first of those four mysteries, Strong Poison, Lord Peter saves Harriet from the gallows when she is put on trial for having murdered her lover. For the next couple of books he will pursue Harriet Vane, from time to time proposing marriage, only to be rejected.
That is the state of affairs at the opening of the third of those books, Gaudy Night, first published in 1935, a book in which Lord Peter plays a distinctly second fiddle role to Harriet Vane – and in which Dorothy Sayers gets to examine the subject of the proper role of women in higher education, which was still a highly controversial issue in the mid-1930s.
Gaudy Night begins with Harriet Vane being invited to attend a Gaudy Night at her old school, Shrewsbury College, a college exclusively for women and a part of Oxford University. Shrewsbury, by the way, is fictional; most of the other Oxford colleges and landmarks mentioned in this book are real. Anyway, a “Gaudy Night” is a sort of school reunion, with “old students” returning to mingle with the dons and the rest of the college staff. Harriet attends despite having qualms – her notoriety as a criminal defendant acquitted of murder makes her unsure of her welcome among a community of scholars as she returns to her academic roots at Oxford, but she is welcomed by everyone from Shrewsbury’s Warden and the Dean down to the “scouts,” as the servants are called who provide necessary services for the students. Her visit is somewhat marred by a couple of seemingly isolated incidents involving poison-pen letters and a peculiarly offensive drawing found on the college grounds, but Harriet Vane, having suffered through a hostile public reaction to her trial for murder, is used to this sort of thing and assumes it is the work of some malicious outsider aimed personally at her.
A few weeks after the Gaudy, however, Harriet receives a call from the Dean of Shrewsbury College: there have been a number of increasingly disturbing events – more poison-pen letters, increasingly dangerous “pranks” – and the school doesn’t know quite how to respond. They do not want publicity, for that would play into the hands of the not-inconsiderable number of male Oxonians who still resent the presence of a women’s college in what had been until recently their all-male domain. The prankster – if that is what we may call the person responsible – is quite clearly seeking to drag the college down by generating unfavorable publicity, and the pranks are becoming more dangerous and more desperate.
From the evidence, it is clear that the person responsible for these attacks – for they are attacks on the college itself – must be some member of the Shrewsbury community. Is it the work of some frustrated intellectual? Do women who have dedicated themselves to scholarship, as opposed to marrying someone and raising a family (which was by far the prevalent fate for most English women in the early 1930s), wind up with personalities so warped that they must take out their frustrations in these increasingly dangerous pranks?
Harriet hopes for some intervention from Lord Peter Wimsey, who spends the better part of the book away from England, on diplomatic missions to an increasingly tense central Europe. This was the time of growing Nazi power in Germany, and there is considerable debate among the Shrewsbury dons over the subservient role of women according to the Nazi world-view. There will be several crises in and around Oxford before Wimsey returns to help Harriet uncover the truth behind the dangerous attacks – and the reader will undoubtedly be surprised to learn what has really been happening.
Among fans of Dorothy L. Sayers, there is some controversy over Gaudy Night. Some object to its length – it is almost as bulky as many of today’s oversized mysteries – and to the quotations and other nuggets of scholastic humor that are provided; others object to some of the views presented about women and their roles in both scholarship and life in general; still others complain about the time devoted to the growing romance between Lord Peter and Harriet Vane. I disagree with all those critics. Sayers has a wonderful writing style that keeps the story moving while providing insightful and witty and, yes, thought-provoking comments that I find extremely entertaining. For example, at one point, Harriet, having composed half of a sonnet, finds that Peter has completed the other portion of the poem to complement what she has written. Sayers observes:
“[Harriet] went to bed thinking more about another person than about herself. This goes to prove that even minor poetry may have its practical uses.”
I love that. Here’s another: Harriet is considering some surprising lines in a letter from Wimsey. She muses:
That was an admission of equality, and she had not expected it of him. If he conceived of marriage along those lines, then the whole problem would have to be reviewed in that new light, but that seemed scarcely possible. To take such a line and stick to it, he would have to be not a man but a miracle.
As you may have guessed, much of the tension in the book comes from the continuing and developing relationship between Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey, and its ultimate resolution is most satisfying.
As always in Sayers, the settings are beautifully drawn; I have been an admirer of Gaudy Night for many years, and I made it a point, while visiting Oxford some years ago, to walk the lovingly-described and remembered streets to find the landmarks so important to both Harriet Vane and Dorothy L. Sayers. The major characters are believable and memorable. This should not be your only Sayers novel – almost certainly not your first. But it should definitely be on your “To Be Read” list as an example of the kind of elegant writing that made the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in England so memorable.
My thanks to Sally Powers, at the "I Love a Mystery" Newsletter, where my review first appeared, for allowing me to expand it for this podcast. [ED. NOTE: Sadly, "I Love a Mystery" is no longer published. but there are numerous editions of Gaudy Night available.]
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You can listen to the original audio review by clicking here.
Next: The Chinese Orange Mystery, by Ellery Queen.