Gaudy Night

I've been mulling over Dorothy L Sayers' Gaudy Night for quite a while. It's by far the best and most thoughtful of Sayers Wimsey novels. It's also a book that doesn't feature a great deal of Lord Peter — he spends most of the book dashing around Europe for the Foreign Office, trying to head off World War II. And while it can be read as a standalone novel, the backstory of Harriet and Peter's relationship doesn't make a great deal of sense without Strong Poison and Have His Carcass, and it also contains serious spoilers for the rest of the mysteries.

The plot begins when Harriet Vane allows herself to be persuaded to return to Shrewsbury College for the first time since her graduation. Despite getting on well with her old tutors and making a conquest of Miss de Vine, the formidably clever new fellow, Harriet finds her contemporaries much diminished by a combination of marriage and motherhood — after encountering a brilliant scholar turned farmer's wife, Harriet has "a depressed feeling that she had seen a Derby winner making shift with a coal-cart." ( More... )