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Heaven: 2021 July Book Discussion: Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers
This month I get the pleasure of leading the conversation around my favourite book in the whole wide world: Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers.
I know many folks here, like me, have read this book: possibly many years ago, and possibly more than once. I hope you'll join in either for a reread, or just to talk about it if you remember it well enough without having to reread.
As for anyone unfamiliar with the book who'd like to give it a try: Gaudy Night is the tenth in Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey series of mystery novels. Published in 1935, it qualifies as "Golden Age" detective fiction, but is possibly the least "detective-y" of the series: the focus is much more on Lord Peter's fellow sleuth and love interest Harriet Vane (the main character from whose point of view most of the novel unfolds), and their relationship, which at this point has unfolded over three books. It concerns a series of events -- possibly pranks, possibly something more sinister -- occurring at an Oxford women's college.
For those who haven't read the book before, the discussion here will remain spoiler-free until I post questions on or shortly after July 20, and I'll try to guide the discussion in such a way that we include the perspectives both of re-readers, and those who are coming to this novel afresh.
Who's in?
I know many folks here, like me, have read this book: possibly many years ago, and possibly more than once. I hope you'll join in either for a reread, or just to talk about it if you remember it well enough without having to reread.
As for anyone unfamiliar with the book who'd like to give it a try: Gaudy Night is the tenth in Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey series of mystery novels. Published in 1935, it qualifies as "Golden Age" detective fiction, but is possibly the least "detective-y" of the series: the focus is much more on Lord Peter's fellow sleuth and love interest Harriet Vane (the main character from whose point of view most of the novel unfolds), and their relationship, which at this point has unfolded over three books. It concerns a series of events -- possibly pranks, possibly something more sinister -- occurring at an Oxford women's college.
For those who haven't read the book before, the discussion here will remain spoiler-free until I post questions on or shortly after July 20, and I'll try to guide the discussion in such a way that we include the perspectives both of re-readers, and those who are coming to this novel afresh.
Who's in?
Comments
I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to state that I've played cricket on the sports ground that is really where her Shrewsbury college was situated.
The real women's colleges at Oxford at the time were Somerville, Lady Margaret, St Hugh's, and St. Hilda's. The first two opened in 1879 with Somerville a bit broader in religion (Lady Margaret was meant to be more Anglican). St Hugh's was founded in 1886 and St. Hilda's in 1893. However women could not get Oxford degrees until 1920 (Cambridge was even slower).
I don't have much connection to any of them (except a cousin of a great grandfather was principal of Somerville).
*Ok, both. But it makes a better story to imply that it's widespread.
(I've even written fan fiction).
I'm in! I know exactly where the house copy should be (I'm sort-of in charge of the fiction shelves), so he'll just have to wait 3 or 4 days whilst I finish the other books I'm reading and then read Gaudy Night. Unless of course, @Sandemaniac can recall how the books are shelved...
I had one of those falling-apart copies (not sure if it was the New English Library edition, but it was an inexpensive mass-market paperback bought many, many years ago). It may have been falling apart because of the poor binding or because I read it so many times, but when I finally, a couple of years ago, treated myself to a proper matching set of nice new editions of the LPW novels and proudly gave them a home on my shelf, I got rid of the rest of my mismatched ones (I had had a jumble of different editions, second hand copies, and some I didn't have at all because I'd read library copies), I found I couldn't throw out the old, tattered Gaudy Night. The physical object of the book itself was like a talisman by that time and I kept with some other very old, very beaten-up paperbacks I couldn't bear to throw out.
I think I may need to know more about this ...
Placetne?
When we went to a dinner event in London shortly before the arrival of Dragonlet 2, Mr Dragon found somewhere to stay in Mecklenburg Square, which of course is where her flat is in the book.
10 or so years ago libraries used to be a reliable source of her books, but I think that unfortunately she is a bit unfashionable outside her fan base.
It is not my favorite Wimsey book, nor even my favorite Vane book. "Have His Carcase" will always hold that spot. The only mystery I ever read that, immediately after reading it, I re-read. It is brilliant. But that is a story for another day.
Wimsey is rather like Shakespeare--the author is over-generous, making the assumption that you have a bigger vocabulary/acquaintanceship with literature/the classics/music/science than you probably do, and therefore catering for that. But again like Shakespeare, you can enjoy it on a lower level when the author overshoots. And there's a different kind of pleasure available if you go hunting to find out what the allusions actually mean. I adore the ones in Busman's Honeymoon, which are mostly to Shakespeare if I remember correctly, and not at all the kind of positive romantic things you'd expect for Peter and Harriet's first month together... The mismatch is hilarious.
I'm Eigon on AO3, and I've written some gender-swapped Lord Peter Wimsey fan fiction in which Peter becomes Lady Petra (but still falls in love with Harriet Vane). In the Gaudy Night one, she's still rather bitter about not being awarded a degree, since she graduated in 1912.
I should probably mention, BTW, that I worked for the University for 16 years (about 8 too long), including several years in a building overlooking the fictional Shrewsbury College site, so I've been thinking about Sayers' Oxford and, as someone who moved there and was that inconvenience a staff member, never a college member, an outsider.
When Sayers was writing, it would have been on the very edge of collegiate Oxford - the new colleges of the later 20th century were not spreading outwards yet, and much of the Science Area was still to be built, so just a few isolated buildings North of Shrewsbury before you met the University Parks and Dragonland (the largely Victorian suburbs in the rich area around the Dragon school). The site now is far more enclosed - regular development since has added buildings around it, the 1920s buildings on St Cross Road that Sayers would have seen bounding her college have been pulled down in the last five years and replaced by blocky student housing, while Merton Cricket Pitch as was is currently home to the temporary buildings hosting the Zoology teaching labs. Pointless aside - Sayers' Mansfield Lane runs through the Kings Mound and the bank seperating the two cricket grounds, which are just about the only surviving above-ground remains of Oxford's defences from the Engish Civil War.
I think it's position on the edge of the town centre is, to a certain amount geographical need (though Max Beerbohm did invent Judas College bang in the middle of town), and also symbolic that a new women's college would be stuck out on the edge somewhere - Somerville and St Hilda's were both rather squeezed into available corners. I can''t remember whether that edge-of-townness has any bearing on the plot yet.
There's also mention of Shrewsbury's shortness of cash - Oxford has a byzantine system inherited over the centuries where the older colleges have vast endowments, whereas many of the newer colleges are very short on readies. At least one science department is notorious for building its new lab in two goes ten years apart because of a shortage of assets, and I remember when you had to send four copies of your CV and covering letter to it if you wanted to apply for a job, to save them photocopying it! But legend has it that you could walk from St John's College in Oxford to St John's in Cambridge and never set foot off land owned by one or the other. Saying that the University is rich is a misnomer - some parts are very rich, especially the old colleges, while others are flippin' skint.
To give you an idea of the scale of St John's - at the North it starts by the annotation of St Giles, and the buildings by Blackhall Road are St Johns, and *everything* down that side of St Giles as far as the buildings marked as St John's are the college, going right out to Parks Road behind Trinity College - it's huge.
Just for completism's sake, here's St Giles to the left and Balliol Rec, the fictional Shrewsbury, to the right.
OK, I think I've blathered enough - do tell me to foxtrot oscar if I am being boring!
It only recently struck me that Sayers created Harriet Vane to be exactly the right age to be in the first lot of women to get Oxford degrees.
I was at St Hugh's where we're a lot more chilled out than either Somerville or Shrewsbury and a HECK of a long way out of the centre of town.
(I did think I'd started a Ship thread on this, but I can't find it now.)
I would also love a copy of that reference guide to the quotations. But it's quite fun when you're reading something else and recognise a quote, and think, Ah! That's where it comes from!
Yes - I saw that. The part about the male undergraduates attacking Girton on the day of the vote was really shocking.
In Gaudy Night she is quite explicitly an MA.
On the other hand, I did snort at the trifling debt to Blackwells that, at the end of a long catalogue of other debts, confirmed exactly what I was being told about the young man in question.
Do I recall correctly that you can wait a certain length of time, and pay a fee to convert your undergraduate degree to an MA? I vaguely recall a colleague doing just that about twenty years ago.
Yes - I dimly recall paying some trivial sum to get my BA converted into an MA.
And re the Blackwell's bill, I think it was mainly an opportunity to use the quote: "a half pennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack".
I find it depends if you like your detective fiction as an entertaining intellectual puzzle without much blood, for example Five Red Herrings, or whether you like your detective fiction to deal with contemporary issues too. This book looks like a romance, but there are a lot of other strands embedded here, which is why so many of us love and reread it, to unpick the other problems, not just the crime, whereas I find that the intellectual puzzles don't give me much to find on rereading.
I agree. I take that interaction about writing a real book with real characters rather than detective fiction cardboard cutout ones to be Sayers' justification for the book she's writing, although also the trajectory she's been on for the previous few books which have become more about rounded characters than the early ones.
Seven years after matriculation, as I recall, and I think the fee used to be GBP 10.
I think that's one of the reasons why the Jill Paton Walsh books don't work for me, other than she can't get the feel or details of the period right, she's not developing that trajectory in the same way as Sayers was over those last Wimsey books.
Harriet Vane got her degree - Lady Petra graduated in 1912, just as Lord Peter did in the real books, so wasn't awarded a degree.