Gaudy Night

For the past few weeks, if not months, I have been thinking about Dorothy L. Sayers’ novels featuring her alter ego, Harriet Vane, and the detective Lord Peter Wimsey. I reread Strong Poison, and listened to a radio play version of Gaudy Night. The issues I was thinking about had more to do with the overall arc of the Vane/Wimsey relationship, the way it began and came to its dramatic climax, so I focused on the first and third of the series and not so much on the second one, Have His Carcase.

The aspects of the books I kept turning over in my mind were psychological features of the Vane/Wimsey romance that had always been compelling to me, while remaining somewhat opaque. In the first book in which Harriet appears, Strong Poison, she is accused of murdering her former lover Philip Boyes, and one reason the general public hates her and is convinced she did it is because of her strange attitude toward the relationship. She lived in sin with Boyes, because she thought he had a principled objection to marriage. When he changed his mind after a year or so and asked her to marry him, she refused him because it turned out not to be a principled objection at all. His change of heart made her feel foolish for having abandoned her own principles, and she assumed that he had asked her to live with him outside marriage as some kind of test. No one observing the trial can make head or tail of this attitude—except, of course, for the sensitive and perceptive Lord Peter Wimsey.

I was always struck by Harriet’s logic, because of the contradictory nature of her character, and the way she seemed modern and old-fashioned at the same time. She is an independent woman who earns her own living and spends most of her time in the bohemian district of Bloomsbury, but she is so committed to her notion of matrimony that she ends up twisting all the way around to solitude and complete social isolation. It’s as if the principle for her is entirely separate from the propriety marriage is usually supposed to promote.

Questions about this attitude of hers stayed with me for years, in a low-level way, picking up different interpretations of it over time. I was particularly struck by a few blog posts by the author Jo Walton, which now no longer exist—although you can still get some of the flavor of her musings about the Vane/Wimsey pairing through the lens of a more formal piece about the culminating novel of the series, Gaudy Night. As Walton says, the books are about “psychologically real people” and Gaudy Night, in particular, is “as good as books get.” Walton observes that what is at issue in both the greater arc of the story, and this particular novel set at Oxford, is the nature of marriage and whether it can really encompass and foster equality:

Again in this novel, as in Strong Poison, Harriet pulls apart social expectation and what is really going on between the two people. They are two separate issues, and the real relation is the important thing. In the earlier novel, the focus is on a few strands of the bond, a handful of the moral principles at stake. Gaudy Night, by contrast, aims at the full picture. All the principles at stake in a union.

The radio play version that I listened to had an interview with the mystery novelists P.D. James and Jill Paton Walsh at the end. Walsh said that the book retains a remarkable vitality, even though it was written in 1935, because the goal of a marriage of equals is still very elusive even at this late date. It is “only” a mystery novel, but it has an enduring appeal—and it has an incredible legacy in practical terms because it inspired thousands of women to pursue their educations at Oxford and elsewhere. Gaudy Night is a novel about women scholars, specifically about women scholars who are so dedicated to their academic pursuits that they hold the principle of intellectual honesty above all others, and its love of the life of the mind rings out across the decades.

In a sense, the question at the heart of Gaudy Night is whether a woman can be intellectually honest—true to her whole self, including the most principled and rigorous part—and also be married. Harriet Vane was originally troubled by the problem of her lover manipulating her. Philip Boyes was not being honest about his true motives in not getting married. On rereading, I noted that this problem comes up in the very first chapter of Strong Poison. It is presented as the essential problem or quandary of Harriet’s character, as she stands trial for murder. This is no doubt why it lingered in the mind as so key to the themes of the series as a whole. However, as the book and the murder trial go on, Harriet comes to complain about how the real issue is that her lover demanded devotion. The essential problem was that the manipulation and failure of principle led to the more protracted problem of always coming second in the relationship, of always being expected to cater to the whims and desires of the other person. Thus it is not just a problem of principle, but one that leaks out into all the rest of the relationship in extremely practical and mundane terms.

Much of the reason the problem of Harriet’s character bothered me for so long was that I had difficulty reconciling her religious attitude with her modernity. I probably had some curiosity about Dorothy L. Sayers herself—why was this deeply devout Christian author still so compelling to a modern audience? The answer, I decided, was that it wasn’t the particular principle that mattered for Harriet, it was the desperate consequences of not understanding her own mind and not being true to herself. That issue is universal.