Gaudy Night

[sawyl]

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."

Thus, the book establishes as concerned with the split that exists in society between women who pursue the life of the mind, as embodied by the celibate dons, and those who've opted for the life of the body, in the form of the married graduates. Harriet, however, finds herself stuck somewhere in the middle. By dint of her notorious sexual relationship with Philip Boyes and, it is largely assumed by those who are scandalised by her reputation, her similar relationship with Wimsey, Harriet is assumed to lead an life somewhere in between the two. But at the same time, Harriet's rejection of marriage, either to Boyes or, latterly, to Wimsey, is largely driven by her desire to retain her intellectual independence.

In March, Harriet receives a letter from the Dean ostensibly inviting her to the opening of the new library but actually seeking her advice on a series of poison pen letters and petty acts of vandalism that have been plaguing Shrewsbury. Harriet agrees to go and proves instrumental in foiling an attempt to ruin the Chancellor's grand opening ceremony. And when she learns the details of the letters, Harriet finds herself in a position to break some bad news to the Dean: she received a poison pen letter at the gaudy before the start of term, thereby limiting the suspects to the dons and a couple undergraduates left in college awaiting reassessment.

The nature of the vandalism and the threats seem to suggest an attack on scholarship in general and female academics in particular: gowns are burnt; the draft copy of Miss Lydgate's monumental and authoritative book on English prosody is damaged with black ink; a series of crude drawings of men being destroyed by female academics are found; an effigy is found strung up in the chapel; and an attempt is made to get a highly strung undergraduate to kill herself. But the motives remain mysterious and the general consensus seems to favour some sort of hysteria brought on sexual frustration.

But Wimsey has his doubts and in one particularly fine scene, he and Harriet and the senior common room explore the question of a scholar's duty to the truth as part of an attempt to get at another motive. Drawing on CP Snow's The Search, Wimsey wonders what an academic ought do when confronted with a piece of scholarship that they know to be wrong but where they also suspect the revelation of the truth may have catastrophic consequences for the individual involved. In Snow's novel, a scientist gives up science after making a careless error while another scientist who deliberately falsifies a result to get a job and finds himself forgiven because he is known to be badly off and any other choice will result in ruin for his family — a choice Snow's characters do not approve of:

The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalise false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.

The dons' different responses bring their characters and motives into focus, both for Harriet & Wimsey and for the reader, making it possible to guess who might be the poison pen and who might be its target.

Gaudy Night is by far and away Sayers' best, most ambitious novel. It plays with some fascinating proto-feminist criticisms of women's traditional roles in society — roles which can be seen to be weakening among Shrewsbury's current crop of undergraduates and which will be further eroded by the second world war — and explores the tensions that arise between compassion for an individual and a person's wider duty to the truth.

The book also features Sayers' strongest cast of characters — a fact metafictionally acknowledged by Harriet's decision to re-write a chunk of her own detective novel to make her central character more realistic and less a simple placeholder. The dons of Shrewsbury are a particularly finely drawn bunch. The Dean is absolutely delightful combination of good sense and cheeky humour — she and Harriet come up with a method of classifying the college's male dinner guests based on whether they wear a hard or soft fronted shirt and, if they're of the hard variety, whether their shirts are prone to strange popping noises. Miss de Vine is every bit as a sharp and clever and clear-sighted as she's supposed to be — having broken off her own engagement many years before after realising that she was unsuited to be a wife, she slices through the gordian knot of Harriet's uncertain feelings for Wimsey with a ruthless logic. Miss Lydgate is a classic academic: precise and focused when dealing with her own field, kindly and slightly vague when out of it. Even Miss Barton, who is initially unsympathetic in her antipathy towards Harriet, becomes increasingly human as the plot gradually draws out her concealed motives for her behaviour.

Harriet, who is often read as a stand-in for Sayers, shines as a lead character. Confronting her past, by returning to her beloved Oxford and meeting her mentors for the first time since her trial, she starts to put her old life behind her and opens up a whole new range of possibilities. Following the sharp-eyed suggestions of Miss de Vine, Harriet also starts to come to terms with her reasons for rejecting Wimsey's regular proposals and her own fear of committing to a relationship that might lead to further emotional damage. Harriet also finds her confidence boosted when an undergraduate becomes besotted with her after she intervenes to detangle the love lives of one of Shrewsbury's young women. All of which makes the final emotional pay off feel genuine when it eventually arrives at the very end of the book.