Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night
A Review of the Classic 1930s Oxford Crime Novel
Gaudy Night is a thriller, a novel of ideas and a romance, as Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey investigate crimes in a women's college in 1930s Oxford.
For many fans, Gaudy Night is a high point of Dorothy L. Sayers’ series of detective novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. The protagonist is not, however, Lord Peter, but Harriet Vane, the novelist whom he rescued from the gallows in the earlier novel Strong Poison. Sayers manages to pack a lot into Gaudy Night: a crime story, a novel of ideas, and a romance, and all so easily interwoven that the reader doesn’t notice the separate strands. The work is also involved in the wider world of the 1930s, including the position of women in higher education and the gathering tensions in continental Europe.
The plot turns around a series of crimes which have occurred at Shrewsbury College, Harriet Vane’s old college at Oxford. Faculty members have started getting poison pen letters, and someone has been vandalising books and papers left lying around. The mystery criminal appears to have some kind of grudge against women at the University, and Vane is torn in her own life between the chance to find peace and security within the walls of academe, and her life in the world outside.
Implored by the dons to help them find the culprit without any publicity, which would inevitably damage not only the college, but women’s standing in the university, Vane calls on Lord Peter. Wimsey can only spend limited time on the case, though, as he is involved with diplomatic activities, and Harriet’s life is complicated by two other men in Oxford. Lord Saint-George, Peter’s feckless and charming nephew, involves her in trying to get Wimsey to pay his debts, whilst another undergraduate, Reggie Pomfret, falls desperately in love with her. The sensitive humour of these scenes plays well against Harriet’s far deeper feelings for Peter, which are hedged about by her pride and past entanglements.
Sayers sketches the politics and cloisters of Oxford with a perceptive and precise eye. Her accounts of academe are based on her own experience: she was a serious Classical scholar and her translation of Dante’s Inferno is still published by Faber. Many of her concerns may seem a bit old-fashioned, (such as the duty of women towards their intellectual work or a possible marriage and family, or the relationship between stratified social classes), but her wit and the strength of her characters ensures Gaudy Night is still very much worth reading.
It’s a testament to the breadth which Sayers brings to the crime novel that Gaudy Night is so engrossing and emotionally involving, yet doesn’t require a single murder to ratchet up the tension. The denouement is as gripping and chilling as most novels with a far higher body count. They call Sayers a writer of “cosies”, but this novel could stay with you for quite a while...
