An Oxford love story

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers (1)

Oxford skyline. Photo ©Wikimedia Commons

Love and hate

‘Whether you advertise it as a love-story, or as educational propaganda, or as a lunatic freak, I leave it to you’, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote to her publisher, Victor Gollancz in September 1935. Note: she didn’t say anything about detective fiction. In the end he played it safe and went with two yellow dust-jackets to advertise Gaudy Night: in one version, its subtitle is simply ‘a novel not without detection’, while the other one announces, more excitedly, ‘Just out! GAUDY NIGHT: a novel – not without detection – in which Lord Peter plays a major part.’ Gollancz was canny enough to predict that Sayers’s tenth novel featuring her popular amateur detective was likely to mean another best-seller.

Sayers herself did not expect her new novel to achieve commercial or critical success, but the critics loved it. The Times Literary Supplement praised it as ‘a discussion from every standpoint of the problem of Woman and the Intellectual Life’, but J.R.R. Tolkein was less keen. ‘I could not stand Gaudy Night,’ he told a friend. ‘I followed P. Wimsey from his attractive beginnings so far, by which time I conceived a loathing for him (and his creatrix) not surpassed by any other character in literature known to me, unless by his Harriet.’¹ George Orwell was equally damning of Sayers in 1936 (‘her stories, considered as detective stories, are very bad ones’)² as was, more surprisingly, her first biographer, Janet Hitchman: ‘If The Nine Tailors was Dorothy’s best book, its successor, Gaudy Night was certainly her worst.’³

Yet ninety years on from its first publication, it remains Dorothy L. Sayers’s best-loved novel, acclaimed by many as the first feminist detective novel. In recent years Gaudy Night has been featured on the Backlisted podcast and ‘Shedunnit’ on BBC Radio 4;

laura thompson

wrote about here, and last week

Helen Lewis

picked it as one of her recommended summer novels (‘because it’s set in Oxford and it’s inexpressibly romantic’). Most modern editions still have ‘A Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery’ somewhere on the cover, but there can be no doubt that it is Harriet Vane who is the star of Gaudy Night. The book begins with her name, and it is she who utters, memorably, its final spoken word.

Gaudy Night is overlong, perhaps, with too many Latin quotations and too little serious detective work, and its class assumptions are unpleasant. But it’s also witty and moving, a tribute to the lifelong importance of education and how hard women had to fight to get it, as Sayers knew from her own experience. It’s a romantic love story and a serious examination of how, as a woman, to reconcile love and work. Above all, it’s a love letter to Oxford.