Gaudy Night
Dorothy L. Sayers
1935
2/5 stars
Harriet Vane, Lord Peter's love interest, returns to her alma mater (the all-female Shrewsbury College, Oxford) to attend the annual Gaudy celebration. While there, she discovers an anonymous letter and a malicious obscene drawing. She is later contacted by the Dean, who reveals that, along with a spate of spiteful vandalism, threatening letters and drawings are being sent to most of the dons and some of the students, upsetting the college as a whole. Harriet is requested to return to Shrewsbury to unmask the culprit. When things take an even nastier turn, she finds herself out of her depth and requests Wimsey's help.
Gaudy Night is heralded as a great feminist novel, is widely lauded as a superb mystery, and was even a nominee for the Anthony Award for Best [mystery] Novel of the Century.
In actuality, it is a disappointment.
It is considered a feminist novel, I assume, because it takes place in an all-female college at a time when educated women were still looked on with some suspicion. Unfortunately, rather than showing educated women in a favorable light, Sayers has the dons become stereotypical catty backbiters when confronted with obstacles outside of their intellectual sphere. In addition, they are snobbish and out of touch with the real world, treating the less educated as inferior. Shrewsbury College is most certainly not a positive feminist example. (Not to mention that the ladies, including Harriet, were unable to solve this problem on their own and had to bring a man in to do it for them.)
Another negative factor is the protagonist herself. Harriet Vane, not a particularly sympathetic character in Strong Poison or Have His Carcase, is positively unlikable in Gaudy Night. It is impossible to see what Wimsey finds lovable enough in Harriet to have kept him hanging around for five years. Her self-obsession alone is enough to make her unbearable, and her interminable inner conversations as to why she can't marry Lord Peter are tedious and irritating.
Then there are the continual philosophical discussions -- enough so that there have been arguments made that Gaudy Night is, in fact, a philosophical novel with some mystery thrown in. Instead of prompting thought and interest, however, these dry talks are dull fillers, bloating an already lackluster mystery to 500 pages.
It feels wrong to rate only two stars to any book by so fine a writer as Sayers, but Gaudy Night is not a fine example of any mystery novel, let alone one of her own. It isn't especially engrossing or surprising, has neither psychological thrills or suspense, and features Lord Peter only minorly. It also lacks much of the wit of previous Sayers' novels, is haughty rather than intelligent, and is, frankly, not a fun read.
I expected to feel differently about this reread at this more mature age, and to see Gaudy Night as so many others do. Sadly, I liked it much less and, next time I do a series read-through, will be skipping it along with Harriet's other two appearances.
