Gaudy Night

⚖The case for it

Sayers puts Harriet Vane back at her Oxford college and lets the dons argue, in earnest and at length, about whether a woman with a mind should marry at all. Readers call it feminist argument wearing a detective novel, catching “the freedom and the shame that successful women feel” in 1935. This is where Harriet finally reads as a whole person rather than a woman who survived a trial. “The smallest bits make the book,” the reunion dinner, the friction in the senior common room. The Harriet and Peter thread is the best relationship writing in the series, from a woman who “invented the perfect man and fell in love.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Readers who came for a body report waiting five hundred pages for one: what they get is poison-pen letters and vandalism, and the restlessness sets in early. Harriet “never does any detecting, she just kinda sits around” reacting to things. The dons arrive as a “confusingly undifferentiated group of characters” and several are types rather than women, filed by one reader as “thwarted virgins.” Untranslated Latin, Greek and French run through the whole book. The suspense the plot leans on does not hold either, since more than one reader “wasn’t surprised by who was the one behind the poison pen letters.”

— the honest librarian

9h

honest hours

13

sittings