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FOR YOUR BOOKSHELF | Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night
The book is set in Shrewsbury College, a fictional women’s college at the University of Oxford. Harriet Vane (originally introduced as Lord Peter Wimsey’s love interest but becomes a protagonist in her own right) visits Shrewsbury, her alma mater, for a reunion (known as a “Gaudy”). When mysterious happenings start to occur at the college, she stays in residence at Oxford to attempt to bring them to an end. Sayers was a so-called “Queen of Crime” in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction (1920s-1930s), so there is no doubt as to her skill in crafting classic murder mysteries. Gaudy Night proves, however, that Sayers skills extend beyond developing entertaining plotlines. With the detective story as the backdrop, she explores the natures of love, friendship, and purpose through Harriet’s eyes.
Sayers herself was one of the first women to attend college at Oxford, though at the time women were ineligible to receive degrees. (She was retroactively awarded a degree in 1920, when that rule changed.) Sayers is best known today for her Peter Wimsey series, but was also a formidable playwright, critic, translator, and Christian writer. Dr. Crystal Downing describes Sayers’s work as “subversive,” and that shines through in Gaudy Night, as she defies common conventions of both gender and genre at the time.
Harriet—whom one easily imagines as a stand-in for Sayers herself—is a self-sufficient, unmarried novelist acutely aware of the criticism women face regardless of their life choices. The all-female Oxford college provides the perfect setting for the story, as she encounters many different women—and opinions—during her stay. From the unmarried and scholastic dons of Shrewsbury to her married college friends who are only politely interested in her work, Harriet struggles with the age-old question of whether a woman can live a fulfilling life without having to sacrifice some crucial aspect of her being: “What are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?” she laments.
You can read the novel to discover what Sayers’s suggestion to that question is, and you can likewise draw your own conclusions. You might not expect that the question of whether or not a woman can indeed “have it all” could be explored so satisfyingly in a whodunnit published in 1936; and yet Harriet’s experiences and wrestled-with thoughts are still relevant today, over eighty years following the book’s initial release. Sayers’s writing is undeniably erudite (if, like me, you’re not up on your Latin, you may find this chapter-by-chapter annotation database useful), yet it is never patronizing. Even to readers who may not prefer detective fiction, Gaudy Night enchantingly investigates questions of the female—and ultimately, human—condition.
