The college invites Vane to return for a season because they are suffering from a poltergeist, who is vandalizing the college and sending hateful mail to students and professors alike. One cannot help but notice the pun in the college’s name: a “shrew” refers to an ill-tempered, argumentative woman. The action takes place at a fictional women’s college, Shrewsbury, at Oxford University.
She would suggest a reframing of the question: women want what all people want. Gaudy Night becomes Sayers’ manifesto, of sorts, in what women want. She had created a woman so like herself that she could not, in good conscience, let the character become merely a deus ex machina in the life of Wimsey.
However, when it came time to accept Wimsey’s proposal, Sayers could not allow her female protagonist to say yes. Rather than murder her hero after a few novels (as Conan Doyle regrettably did), Sayers decided to marry him off, and thus created Harriet Vane. When Sayers began writing her Peter Wimsey stories in 1923, she fashioned a descendant of Sherlock Holmes, though with a monocle, much more charm, and a passion for quotation. Like Sayers herself, Vane reveals the capabilities of women and the egalitarian nature of human desires -to be free, happy, and to excel in their work.įor all of Gaudy Night‘s heavy lifting in regards to women’s roles and moral questions about human nature, it is a witty and suspenseful mystery novel.
For Sayers, it becomes what Woolf calls “a room of one’s own,” a place where she can be at liberty write without thought to the expectations of her sex to marry nor to limit herself to the conventions of her Oxford education. In Gaudy Night, the semi-autobiographical heroine Harriet Vane also resides in Mecklenburgh Square, and readers catch on to the significance of this choice of accommodation. A biography by Francesca Wade, Square Haunting (2020), celebrates her audacity ( Wade discusses Gaudy Night here on the National Review podcast.) Sayers rented a flat in Mecklenburgh Square, where other notable writers like Hilda Doolittle and Virginia Woolf once made their homes. A struggling, independent female in 1920s London when women were not encouraged to work, Sayers was pushing against the current in all sorts of ways. She began publishing mysteries for the money. Dorothy Sayers was a successful mystery novelist when she published Gaudy Night (1935), yet this novel is revered as the most literary of her fiction titles.
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