Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night (1935)

DOROTHY SAYERS, GAUDY NIGHT (1935) Part I MIDDLE-BROW FICTION “Generous and expansive in dimension, Gaudy Night is a long book, faithful to the code of detective fiction in various fashions […] But the story fatally strains against the strictures of the genre with the richness of its characterizations and the complexity of their motivation, such that order restored is no order indeed, the final reading of the Great Detective only another of the plentitude of misreadings which constitute the text” (Brody, 96) “the novel is valuable not just because it aspires to raise the status of detective fiction but because it highlights the complexity of the connections between representation, reception, and perceived literary quality.” (Bogen, 255) Chapter 2, Gaudy Night Chapter 7, Gaudy Night “Lavishing such care on an ostensibly middlebrow genre polarized critics, who found her ambitious approach either revelatory or insufferably pretentious.” (Armstrong, 147) “She displays knowingness about literature without any sensitiveness to it or any feeling for quality. [S]he has an academic literary taste over and above having no general taste at all.” Q. D. Leavis, “The Case of Miss Dorothy Sayers,” (1937) “[Sayers] does not write very well: it is simply that she is more consciously literary than most of the other detective-story writers and that she thus attracts attention in a field which is mostly on a sub- literary level.” Edmund Wilson, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” (1945) THE NOSTALGIC UTOPIAN UNIVERSITY Chapter 2, Gaudy Night “First, Oxford and Cambridge, the ancient English Universities, form the template against which other kinds of universities are measured and found wanting. Second the university is treated as culture’s citadel besieged by proletarians, women, scientists, and foreigners” “signifies aristocratic Englishness rooted in social and masculine privilege” (Carter, 215) “The lower birth rate, smaller families, and higher standard of living all improved the condition of women's lives; it finally became possible for girls to imagine choosing a life without motherhood” (McClellan, 325) “It was not until the mid nineteenth century that women began to make small and gradual advances into higher education. The first women’s colleges, Queen’s College and Bedford College, were founded in the 1840s […] with the intention of catering to governesses who wished to improve their financial prospects. In these pioneering early years, women attended classes and took exams as any male student might, but they could not officially receive degrees until the late nineteenth century.” (English, 25) “As G. K. Chesterton once stated, crime stories tackle ‘the traitors within our gates’, those who compromise or trespass upon the ostensible stability of the hegemonic community. In the history of higher education, women, both students and scholars, have always been classed as interlopers. What is evident [in novels like Gaudy Night] is that women are criminalized by their desire for admittance, both physically and intellectually, to scholarly and educational spaces” and such “texts make literal the metaphorical association with transgression and criminality with which the educated woman had been tarnished.” (English, 30) “With the setting at an Oxford women's college, one might expect a departure from typical gender stereotypes; however, each character assumes a different feminine or maternal role, and the same age-old labels recur: the flirt, the embittered spinster, the vulnerable, middle-aged bookworm, and so on” (McClellan 329) Chapter 6, Gaudy Night DOROTHY SAYERS, GAUDY NIGHT (1935) Part II Chapter 4 Gaudy Night Chapter 14 Gaudy Night Chapter 1 Gaudy Night Chapter 3, Gaudy Night Chapter 22, Gaudy Night Chapter 17, Gaudy Night “There is a seamless web connecting the proto-fascism of the college servants in the book's Oxford setting to Lord Peter Wimsey's mysterious off-stage diplomatic negotiations, and from the naive enthusiasm for eugenics to the burning of scholarly books and manuscripts. At the same time, it is immensely important that the violence that is unleashed against the women dons in Harriet Vane's old college is rooted in the failings of the servant class when its members strive to rise above their appropriate station in life.” (Glover, 46) (Childs, 10) “as a qualified physician, [R. Austin] Freeman had published a book on eugenics entitled Social Decay and Regeneration (1921) in which he attempted to isolate the main causes of what he saw as Britain's precipitous decline. Chief among these were a drift towards collectivism as a result of World War I, a development which was interrupting 'the continuity of social evolution'; and the spread of mechanized production methods.” (Glover, 43) SELECTED READING • Armstrong, Stephen. "Writing Gender Identity through Musical Metaphor in Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night." Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 21 (2017): 146- 168. • Brody, Miriam. "The Haunting of" Gaudy Night": Misreadings in a Work of Detective Fiction." Style (1985): 94-116. • Bogen, Anna. "“Neither Art Itself nor Life Itself”: Gaudy Night, the Detective Novel, and the Middlebrow." Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 49.3 (2016): 255-272. • Chapman, Siobhan. "Towards a Neo-Gricean Stylistics: Implicature in Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night." Journal of Literary Semantics 41.2 (2012). • Childs, Donald J. Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats and the Culture of Degeneration. Cambridge University Press, 2001. SELECTED READING CONTINUED • Delamater, Jerome, and Ruth Prigozy, eds. Theory and Practice of Classic detective fiction. No. 62. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997. • English, Elizabeth. “‘Much Learning Hath Made Thee Mad’: Academic Communities, Women’s Education and Crime in Golden Age Detective Fiction.” Women, vol. 31, no. 1, Mar. 2020, pp. 23-51. • Glover David. The Writers Who Knew Too Much: Populism and Paradox in Detective Fiction’s Golden Age. In: Chernaik W., Swales M., Vilain R. (eds) The Art of Detective Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, pp.36-49. • Hall, Jasmine Y. "A Suitable Job for a Woman: Sexuality, Motherhood, and Professionalism in Gaudy Night." Contributions to the Study of Popular Culture 62 (1997): 169-176. • Harrison, William H. "Loving the creation, loving the Creator: Dorothy L. Sayers's theology of work." Anglican theological review 86.2 (2004): 239. • McClellan, Ann. "Alma Mater: Women, the Academy, and Mothering in Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night." LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 15.4 (2004): 321-346. • Young, Laurel. "Dorothy L. Sayers and the New Woman Detective Novel." Clues 23.4 (2005): 39..

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