On Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night

A wonderful distraction from pressing realities has been reading Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night. Set in Oxford before the second World War (interbellum?), this mystery centers around criminal action taking place at a fictional women’s college, Shrewesbury. The main character isn’t Sayers’ famous Peter Wimsey, but his love interest Harriet Vane. Someone has been leaving crude and insulting letters directed at the unmarried women academics, destroying gowns and dissertations, and causing havoc in the women’s library. Harriet is called in to uncover the culprit, but I’m 300 pages in, and she hasn’t made much progress. Lord Peter has just arrived on the scene, and they are punting on the Isis in their white linen. Sigh.

Though the pace is slow, the diction is rich, and I’m savoring it. Reading this novel is almost as good as a little vacation to that time and place. (I’m also resurrecting memories of Oxford from a brief visit my mother and I made 14 years ago, when I was 8 months pregnant with my first, to see my sister, who was studying for a semester there. Spring was just arriving, and we spent about a week touring around the Cotswolds in a little micra car and wandering about Oxford. Poking around the museum of natural history was a highlight, as was an afternoon concert. Three days after our flight back home, which was Newport, Rhode Island, at the time, my water broke while we were at church in Boston, and our first born entered the world five weeks early. Happily, he’s a healthy lad who turns 14 next month.)


I have my suspicions about the identity of the criminal, but I’m a little unsure about the romance – will Harriet finally accept Peter’s proposals of marriage or will he stop proposing or will she remain married to her work, writing detective novels? The compatibility of marriage and career is an interesting theme running through the book. None of the female dons is married, but the reasons for not marrying are varied: some are adamantly opposed to women academics marrying, some pity the married, one seems to be a manhater. The “poison-pen” is assumed to be one of the faculty because one of the letters was in Latin, and the suggestion is that celibacy has made this person bitter and malevolent, or at least that is what the college is afraid the outside world will assume.

Harriet has declined Peter’s marriage proposals not only because she apparently was involved in some romantic scandal in an earlier book, but also because she fears an unequal marriage, in which either her career or her husband’s will have to be sacrificed to uphold the marriage. She worries that spouses are doomed to envy or resent the other. She and one of the suspected dons have a conversation about how marriage is a job: “The worst of being a job,’ said Miss de Vine, “is the devastating effect it has on one’s character. I’m very sorry for the person who is somebody else’s job; he (or she, of course) ends by devouring or being devoured, either of which is bad for one.”

If this were the only view presented, I’d despair of Harriet ever accepting Peter’s proposal, but Miss de Vine also says “though there are a few rare people, I believe, who don’t look on themselves as jobs but as fellow creatures.”

An interesting side trail: I was reading somewhere that the attraction to vampire romances is rooted in the sublimated desire to be consumed by one’s beloved, a sort of twisted desire for unity.


So not only am I trying to put together clues about the identity of the perpetrator, but also clues about Dorothy Sayers’ view of marriage. She has one character say that marriage makes you fat, another is proof that marriage causes premature aging. One epigraph from Richard Burton praises virginity. But then there are a few bright examples of marriage: the archaeologist and her husband who complement each other so well, and Harriet is greatly flattered by a proposal of marriage from an undergraduate she befriended. And her feelings are obviously conflicted about Lord Peter. She seems to be afraid they would be unequally yoked, but it is clear that Lord Peter would view her as a fellow creature, not a job, and would allow her to continue writing and solving crimes.

I’m eager to read more, but I'm glad the book is a thick 468 pages…