This is the 12th book in Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey series. This book, however, is centered around Harriet Vane who returns to her college in Oxford to help them solve a mystery with anonymous letters and vandalism. Although Peter Wimsey does not appear until the book is nearly over, Harriet Vane spends a lot of time thinking about him and his marriage proposal. Despite the relative absence of Lord Peter Wimsey, it is still an enjoyable experience to spend so much time with Harriet Vane.

The mystery itself is rather weak and there is a lot of Oxford terminology that I was not really familiar with. ( )

Dorothy L. Sayers was a snob of the highest order, and not at all my cup of tea. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing wrong with authors who are antiquated in style (Proust, one of my homeboys) or problematic (Woody Allen's comedy) or indeed high-and-mighty, antiquated, and problematic (my bookshelf is a shrine to Lawrence Durrell) but something about Sayers puts me off.

Is it her half-page epigraphs at the commencement of each chapter? Her rambling style? Her characters' proclivity to burst into Latin without a footnote, even in a modern edition (not necessarily a problem for a classicist such as myself, but still annoying)? Or the sheer audacity of a 520-page mystery novel? I mean, even at their best, these things - whether by Christie, Marsh, Tey, or Innes - were designed to be amusements to pass the time, not Tolstoy. Perhaps it's Harriet Vane's unwillingness to really get involved in solving the mystery, and leaving it up to her bf.

Either way, I didn't enjoy Sayers in highschool and I still don't care for Gaudy Night but I appreciate that - much like my willingness to get lost in Pym or Zola - for some, Sayers fits their heart and soul specifically. I'll stick to the other Golden Age crime writers, thanks. (Delectable speech by the non-murderer at the end, though!) ( )

Book on CD read by Ian Carmichael
2.5***

Book # 10 in the Lord Peter Wimsey series focuses not on Peter, but on Harriet Vane.

Harriet arrives at Shrewsbury College, Oxford, for the annual celebration known as Gaudy Night. She is one of the alumnae, though hardly typical, remaining single and earning her living as a mystery writer, while keeping company with Lord Peter Wimsey, whose proposals of marriage she keeps declining. But what promised to be a pleasant, if sometimes awkward, homecoming, turns decidedly ominous with a series of destructive “pranks” and malicious, vile graffiti.

This seemed very slow and plodding for a mystery, and I wasn’t terribly interested in much of it. Lord Peter is off on some secret assignment, and difficult to reach, though Harriet does manage to get him to come to her aid when she’s unable to capture the “poltergeist” on her own.

There were times when I was ready to applaud Sayers’ efforts at focusing the story on the women – not just the students and staff of Shrewsbury, but the alumnae who were also present. There certainly were plenty of suspects and the perpetrator seemed able to vanish without a trace. But the series is focused on Lord Peter Wimsey, after all, so he had to make an appearance. Still, I was irritated that it was HE who finally solved the case. And the speech the culprit gave once caught, a diatribe on “women’s place at home, caring for her man and not taking jobs as should be his,” just set my teeth on edge.

Ian Carmichael is a talented actor, and he plays Lord Peter in the BBC series based on these books. But with the focus on Harriet and the women of Shrewsbury, I think the audiobook would have been better if narrated by a woman. ( )

Re-read, November 2021: There’s so much to take in with this book, and even though I’ve read it 3 or 4 times now, every time it still feels like a fresh peeling back of the layers and trying to understand. It’s a bit more complex than what I can competently parse, but I do love it so.
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Original review:

The dialogue and prose in Gaudy Night is some of the richest I have ever read. It's very dense and it takes time to understand it, but that's what creates such a connection between me and this book. Hours after finishing the last page, phrases from it still roll around in my head to be savored.

This volume contains the resolution for a romantic relationship three books in the making, and, incidentally, one of the most thoughtful adult relationships I can recall in fiction. Much as I enjoy reading about the Mr. Darcys and Mr. Rochesters of the literary world, you can have them all and leave me Lord Peter Wimsey. He's the one with the real power of mind, heart, and words.

I have heard that Dorothy Sayers, having created her detective and slowly endowed him with great complexity, more or less fell in love with him, and created a match for him in "Harriet Vane," a stand-in for herself. It wouldn't surprise me at all. His blend of intelligence, compassion, wit, honesty, affectation, nervous energy, and control is unique, contradictory, and hardly imaginable in the real world, but very appealing.
I also love Harriet Vane a lot. Her honest analytical mind is only enhanced by her all-too-relatable emotions as she tries to work out whether it is possible to balance the demands of brain versus heart.

Favorite passage:
"I suppose one oughtn't to marry anybody, unless one's prepared to make him a full-time job."
"Probably not; though there are a few rare people, I believe, who don't look on themselves as jobs but as fellow-creatures." ( )

paperback