Caroline: J.R.R. Tolkien couldn’t stand it. George Orwell thought it was a bad detective story. One critic has described its protagonist as “a Yoko Ono figure” who lured her creator away from writing crime fiction. And yet, Gaudy Night is a brilliant and beloved novel, fervently discussed and re-read by those, like me, who love it, and arguably Dorothy L. Sayers’s greatest work.
But is it really golden age detective fiction, and are there too many Latin quotations in it? We’re going to have to take a closer look to find out.
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Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.
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I love to read widely for Shedunnit, introducing new titles to listeners and finding obscure connections between them. That isn’t always the most satisfying way to gain a greater understanding of interwar crime fiction, though. Sometimes you need to go deep, rather than wide.
That’s the approach that I want for the book under scrutiny today. I’m into my seventh year of making this show, believe it or not, and over that time I’ve heard from countless listeners that Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers holds a special place in their heart. Often, it’s what brought them to this genre in the first place. I’ve heard about special editions gifted as marriage proposal tokens and of lives changed by some of the philosophical content Sayers wove through her story. And then I’ve also heard from others, who find Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey insufferable and can’t understand what all the fuss is about. I think this might be the most polarising yet popular work of detective fiction published between 1918 and 1939. It’s long overdue some more airtime on Shedunnit.
And so, that’s what it’s going to get today. My production assistant Leandra Griffith is joining me for this conversation, as she had never read this book before, and I thought it would be more interesting for you to hear both from someone who is new to it and someone who has been re-reading it for decades.
We actually recorded this back in September, when the Shedunnit Book Club was reading Gaudy Night as its chosen book for the month, so members have already heard a much longer, almost hour-long, version of this episode. Leandra and I make long conversational episodes like this every month discussing the club’s book of choice, so if you like us talking about books, you might want to consider becoming a member so you can hear more of it. Find out more and sign up at shedunnitbookclub.com/join.
Some quick background information about Gaudy Night before we get into it. It was first published in 1935, and was Dorothy L. Sayers penultimate full-length crime novel featuring her series detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. It also belongs to a mini arc within her books following crime novelist character Harriet Vane — this sequence began with Strong Poison in 1930 and continued with Have His Carcase in 1932. Gaudy Night comes next, and then Harriet and Peter’s story concludes in 1937’s Busman’s Honeymoon, which was first a play and then a novel. There are a couple of short stories after that and a quartet of continuation novels by Jill Paton Walsh, but those principal four books are what you’re going to hear us referencing today. Gaudy Night is seen by many as the culmination of Sayers’s project to expand the conventions of the golden age detective novel to allow for deeper character development and a more literary sensibility.
There are going to be spoilers throughout this conversation, so if you haven’t read the book and don’t want to hear discussion of the full plot yet please pause here and come back when you are ready. I also want to warn you that there is a brief mention of suicide in this episode.
Gaudy Night begins with Harriet Vane, successful crime novelist and the survivor of a seriously yet false murder accusation (documented in Strong Poison) receiving an invitation to a gaudy, or reunion, at the Oxford college she attended. She decides to go, despite feeling wary since the publicity surrounding her courtroom experiences and brush with the death penalty. While at Shrewsbury College, she receives a horrible anonymous note, and in the months after is drawn into an investigation there as the college is terrorised by a mysterious poison pen and mischief maker, known within the walls as “the poltergeist”. Harriet moves back into the college to try and discover the malefactor’s identity, and has to confront her complicated feelings about the academic life. Later, she calls on Lord Peter Wimsey, the aristocratic amateur sleuth who helped to exonerate her from the false murder charge, to help with the case. Once he arrives in Oxford and enters the investigation, the poltergeist’s attacks turn more serious. In between sparring with Peter about music and chess and the meaning of life, Harriet must find out who has being causing havoc in Shrewsbury College before someone is seriously hurt.
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Caroline: We’re going to start by talking through our priors on this book. Leandra, do you want to start us off there? What was it like reading this book for the first time with relatively little prior knowledge of it?
Leandra: I was pleasantly surprised. Not that I expected to dislike it, but I did feel intimidated because I know that there are some really hardcore fans of Dorothy L Sayers, and I wasn’t sure how much I would like this in comparison to Whose Body?.
I appreciated Whose Body?, but I didn’t absolutely adore it. It’s not one of my favorite detective fiction novels, so when I picked this up, I really enjoyed it. I really appreciated Harriet Vane especially. I think that she added a different dynamic. I think she’s a fan favorite as well amongst Sayers fans. And she was just so refreshing. So I really enjoyed it. I was surprised by how long the book was because my experience with Whose Body was, is it a bit of a novella almost? Maybe it’s 200 pages. Something around there. So when I picked this up and I realized that my edition had 450 pages, I was like, oh my gosh. I had to adjust my expectations, but I appreciated taking my time with it. I liked being in the world. I liked being in Oxford and getting to know the various scholars and figuring out who was who.
That took a little bit of time, but once I knew the various characters, I just liked enjoying my time with Harriet and Lord Peter and the supposed poltergeist that was being a bit of a terror on the university grounds.
Caroline: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting that you had certain expectations going in, even though you had done your best to avoid being fully spoiled.
I think we’ll come onto that a bit later. I do think Sayers in general, and this novel in particular, have garnered a reputation for unapproachability that I don’t think is wholly justified by the actual novel. But I should say what my own experience with this book is. Going right back to the beginning, before I even read this, I went to Oxford as an undergraduate.
I had the Harriet Vane experience, in a sense. I didn’t go to a women’s college, although I do slightly regret that now. I wish I had. I would like to have been part of that tradition at the university, which I think is very important. But I didn’t have those feelings when I was 18. I didn’t know. I actually went to a college which embarrassingly didn’t even admit women until after I was born.
But anyway, so I did have somewhat of the same undergraduate experience as is described in the book 70 or so years later. But I hadn’t read the book while I was there. It never crossed my radar at all. I didn’t read it until long after I’d graduated and I had delved more fully into my reading of detective fiction. But once I did come across this novel and read it, I found a lot in it that I personally related to about the experience of attending university, but not being fully of the university, shall we say.
Even when I went to Oxford, there was still very clearly a type of person who felt very at home there, who perhaps had family members attend in the past, who maybe had siblings ahead of them or behind them, who came from a world where dressing for dinner every night and wearing three different outfits during the day was just quite normal.
I did not come from that world and it was all quite a culture shock for me, and I never fully really became at home in it. So I enjoyed finding some of that sentiment from Harriet Vane and Gaudy Night as well, and the different discussions of the undergraduates in the book, those who are there on scholarships and those who aren’t, those for whom the work is very important, those for whom the social life is more important.
I saw the 21st century versions of that in action. That’s what I brought to Gaudy Night initially. I really liked it, it really resonated with me, and it actually helped me process some unresolved feelings I had about having been to Oxford at the time. And then I’ve revisited it every couple of years since.
I do this with several detective novels that I really like, this being one of them. I read them every few years, and I enjoy returning to them and seeing what new feelings I have from whatever new stage of life I’m in. And this rereading of Gaudy Night, I finally fully felt like a master of the novel, if that makes sense.
I had previously rather struggled at times to keep all of the dons straight in my head because they’re referred to both by their names like Miss Allison, Miss Edwards, Miss Hilliard, but then also their titles. So the bursar, the treasurer, the secretary, the dean. Sometimes I struggle to keep them all exactly straight in my head and you just want to get through the mystery so you keep reading and you don’t take the time to work that out.
I hadn’t fully appreciated some of the more subtle hints that Sayers makes towards things that were happening at the time. Peter’s overseas for quite a lot of the novel working for the Foreign Office plumbing diplomatic leaks or something like that is his phrase for it.
And I hadn’t ever really considered before that of course he would be doing that in 1935. Because, what’s just around the corner? Do some people already know what’s coming? The events of 38, 39, war is looming. I’d never really seen that shadow over the novel before and I did on this rereading.
And then I also came to a fuller appreciation of the journey that Harriet goes on in this novel, of how reluctant she is to go back to Oxford at the very start, and then how reluctant she is to leave it later on in the book, how she feels safe and secluded and happy there, and like she’s accessing a version of herself that she can’t get to anywhere else.
So yeah, all of that came up for me this time afresh on, I’m not sure what number rereading this was, but let’s say we’re in double figures now.
Leandra: I’m so glad that you brought up this idea of Harriet reflecting upon her time, almost having a foot back in Oxford and a foot in the outside world and her balancing how things have changed at the university, things that she is maybe not as appreciative of. She prefers the way that they were before, while also acknowledging that she’s changed as a person, that the other women she attended the university with are very different. And that’s the perspective I came from, even though Obviously, unlike you, I didn’t attend Oxford, I’m not from the UK, but I can relate to this idea of if I return to my alma mater, or any type of reader can reflect on this and relate to the idea of leaving your hometown, leaving a space, a community that you were once very familiar with, and maybe five, ten, 15 years later, you come back to it and realize that some things are the same, some things aren’t, and have to ruminate over whether you’re okay with that. It’s a bit of a coping mechanism where you have to decide, I need closure. Am I okay with not being a part of this world anymore? And if I am, what’s to come? Or, do I actually want to remain a part of it?
Because that’s what I was most surprised by, that I felt very seen by Harriet, especially at the beginning of the book, when she meets up with her friend Mary and she has this realization saying to herself, It’s a mistake. It’s a great mistake. I shouldn’t have come. Mary is a dear, as she always was, and she is pathetically pleased to see me, but we have nothing to say to one another.
And there’s this realization that they’re very different people, back then they were, but even more so now they’re in different places. And at one point Harriet is sad to know that now when she thinks of Mary, she will see this woman in front of her, not the Mary she knew back in college, who was young and had this bright future ahead of them.
And I think we all have felt that before, whether it be with a family member, a friend, or just someone that we haven’t seen in quite some time. And now that vision of that person has replaced all of the past visions. And yeah, so I think that what people might not realize going into Gaudy Night, that there is a lot of things that you can relate to that aren’t, highbrow or too beyond our understanding.
If we haven’t read the certain classics, you can pretty much ignore a lot of the classics that are mentioned and just appreciate the human behavior, the relationships that they have that these women and other characters in the novel are experiencing. So that was one of my favorite parts. Plus, it’s very funny.
I didn’t expect it to laugh as much, and I find it not just clever, but just some dialogue humour. There are some humorous, odd happenings, weird situations that made me laugh that weren’t to do with clever wordplay, for instance.
Caroline: Yes, there’s a sentence in this book that I quoted in my first book about the Thames estuary, that I think very much speaks to what you’re saying, Sayers says, “no one can bathe in the same river twice, not even in the Isis”, which is actually, if you care, a slight mutation of a classical quotation from Heraclitus about memory and not being able to swim in the same waters.
But it’s also a very clever contemporary observation because Oxford students do or did swim in the river. And what she’s saying is this version of the river I’m seeing now is not the same as the one that I saw as a student. I cannot go back to being that person. I am this person here now.
Oxford does have this peculiar effect because it materially looks the same and has for centuries. It’s easy to be tricked while you’re there into thinking that the place looks the same, so maybe I am the same as I was when I was here. But no, Harriet’s not the same. Mary’s not the same. They’ve grown into adults and made choices and had lives that are no longer compatible.
They no longer come together as friends anymore. And it’s unpleasant sometimes to have to be confronted with that realization that you are aging and the world is changing and everything, including friendships, doesn’t keep up. But, to your point about Sayers’ humour. I think that’s a really underrated aspect of this book.
You can talk forever, I certainly could, about the serious philosophical and intellectual themes of this book. Less attention, I think, is paid to the jokes. And one of my favorite Strands of humour running through it concerns something that happens at dinner. The college where Harriet and the Dean, Ms. Martin, who are particular friends, they become very interested in the shirt fronts of the different male guests who come to dinner on different nights. Dinner at an Oxford College traditionally has what’s called a high table where the academics sit, and then the rest of the hall is students and other people.
And if you are dining at high table, you’re expected to wear formal dress, often black tie or black tie equivalent clothes. And these men are turning up some of them are wearing like soft shirt fronts. And I think there’s a phrase, one man, because he’s got quite a hollow chest, he looks a bit like the scooped out rind of a melon, they say.
And then there’s another guest who’s wearing a more old fashioned hard shirt front, like a really starched one, and it clicks every time he moves like a beetle’s legs and they find this hysterical yeah, it’s very funny the way it’s described and that image of these very serious academic women sitting at their high table in their college, which is only there because of their great fortitude and scholarship, laughing behind their hands because this man’s shirt makes a funny noise when he moves. To me, that’s very amusing. And there’s lots of moments like that throughout.
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I think we should though look at the mystery element of this novel because I think it is also very easy to get caught up in all of the other themes and characters which are so complex and rich and forget that as the first cover for the UK edition of this book this is a novel not without detection.
It was marketed as a mystery novel, even though Sayers was clearly pulling away from the conventions of that a bit. What do you make of it as an actual detective novel?
Leandra: I really enjoyed that the mystery still remained complex. It was difficult to pinpoint what actually happened, what the resulting offences were.
Because, ultimately, this person, at least at the beginning of the novel, wasn’t physically harming anyone. They were just causing these disruptions, almost causing mental and emotional damage rather than physical damage, and that’s much harder to have something palpable. You can’t put it in your hands. You can’t hold onto it.
And then, of course, it progressed into something more violent. The perpetrator ended up becoming a bit more daring, you could feel the escalation. All of the characters realized that they were on a bit of a time sensitive situation.
They just knew that at some point this person was not going to be satisfied with simply destroying someone’s work, or putting up an effigy to scare someone. They were going to eventually warm up to the idea of hurting someone, which I really enjoyed because it’s a much more subtle suspense and sense of tension for all of the characters.
And I also think that there’s an art to providing a mystery that doesn’t have murder. There are attempts, right? The attempted suicide that was caused by the harmful letters sent to this one student who was very vulnerable. And of course, Harriet Vane is attacked. She was not meant to be the person attacked, if I’m remembering correctly, but she still was attacked.
There was an intention of trying to kill someone. But the fact that a lot of us are used to mysteries in detective fiction having a death, and it could be multiple deaths, which I do love. I love when we’re just having the body count add up and you’re just wondering, are they going to find this person before someone else dies?
I think it’s harder for a writer to keep you captivated, especially for so long. Again, this is a much thicker mystery, and there isn’t even a murder in it. I enjoyed it. I respect Dorothy L. Sayers for pulling this off. and not having someone actually die.
Caroline: It really is a very subtle book in that regard. Something that, again, I feel like I gained in this reading of it is an understanding of how connected all of this is to the idea of reputation. Peter Wimsey, in his summing up at the end of the case, makes a comment on this. He says that the poltergeist, as they have come to call her, she starts out this campaign really with the intention of discrediting academic women.
She wants to make the college ridiculous in the sight of the rest of the university. She wants to undermine them. She wants them probably ultimately to be penalized or rejected by the scholarly community in some way. But because actually Oxford stands together. They stand behind the women. They don’t allow the press to get hold of the story.
And because she doesn’t get satisfaction she doesn’t get a lot of support from the women of Shrewsbury in destroying their reputations in that way, I think then she progresses up, then I’m just going to physically harm you.
I can’t seemingly take away your professional standing so easily, but I can take away your health and your happiness and your content. And that is a very subtle way of designing a mystery to concern it with something to do with reputation rather than just life or death. So yes, very interesting.
Ultimately, she has to call in Peter Wimsey himself. And he comes in, would you say two thirds, is it about two thirds of the way through the book?
Leandra: Yeah, I would say that because he’s mentioned throughout. I was looking through, and of course, the other women at the college are inquiring about him, and Harriet Vane is annoyed, saying, why do people keep wanting to know about him?
I don’t want to talk about him. And so his presence is always there, and I would say it takes about two thirds of the way for him to physically be there because she’s also trying to track him down. He’s running off to different embassies, Helping with international situations. So once he’s finally there Then we see him as an ever present figure If not with Harriet Vane, nearby. She can easily reach out to him. It is funny how little he’s physically there on the page.
Caroline: Yes. He is not the dominant detective of this detective novel.
That role definitely goes to Harriet Vane. He comes in late on. And he tidies up some loose ends, as it were, he conducts some investigations of his own. He travels around the UK a bit, visiting relevant locations to try and uncover the story that is behind what’s going on with the Poltergeist to discover the motives.
And he and Bunter have a scene where they do some brushing for fingerprints in the college and generally showing off their detective skills. But it’s all condensed towards the end. There are a few Agatha Christie Poirot novels that do something similar. Cat Among the Pigeons from the 1950s is one that comes to mind where you get, again, about two thirds, almost three quarters of a novel with original characters that you’ve never met before.
And then Poirot enters in the last five chapters or something and solves it all. The end. It feels, A bit like we’re going in that direction. Although of course, Wimsey is a presence before in letters and in references, but very much as a negative one, because Harriet in the first two thirds of the novel is feeling quite resentful towards him.
She is resenting that their names are perpetually coupled because the trial in Strong Poison, where she was on trial for murder and he was the reason that she was acquitted. And people find him interesting. He’s known to be handsome and intelligent and he’s an aristocrat. So of course people are nosy and they want to know and they suspect that there is some deeper connection between Harriet and Peter and they ask prying questions. She understandably resents it. But she also hates the feeling of gratitude that she feels that she has to have towards him at all times and that she has to keep her temper in check whenever he’s mentioned. Almost all of this, we should say, is not imposed by Peter. It’s in Harriet’s own mind.
I don’t think he’s ever demanded gratitude from her or expected it, but she has developed those feelings as a result of the trauma of what she went through. Then he arrives in person in Oxford and she has a bit of a revelation about him. Her feelings towards him change very rapidly, having been about the same for about five years.
This resentful gratitude she feels to him suddenly unravels and It’s partly the place, partly Oxford, feeling that they are equals in Oxford, they are both graduates of the university and there’s nothing else that matters to Oxford apart from that. And it’s also partly the case, it’s the actual themes to do with women’s education and equality in partnership and all of these other things that are always simmering away alongside the activities of the poltergeist.
All of this is unlocking new ideas in her brain.
Leandra: Yeah, I am glad that you brought up the idea of Harriet’s resentment towards Peter being all due to her own feelings of wanting some independence, some agency, some control over her own life. I thought that was quite interesting, and I think I mentioned it to you while I was reading the book, and you had said that these two characters have certainly grown.
They weren’t necessarily this civil and mature and appreciative of each other as they are in Gaudy Night, and I like that character development, now I definitely want to read Strong Poison and every other book that features these two characters but because I have Gaudy Night to know that they will eventually be able to see eye to eye and appreciate each other. I’m very excited to see how that develops.
Caroline: Yes, definitely in Have His Carcase, which is the Harriet and Peter book in between Strong Poison and this one, they are much harsher in their attitudes to each other. He’s much more inclined to make jokes of everything and she’s much more inclined to snap back at him and really demonstrate her complicated feelings around gratitude and so on.
The crucial turning point, the moment when Harriet realizes that She’s not going to be able to just eliminate Peter from her life as she has previously been planning. They are at this point in a punt, little boat, on the Cherwell River in Oxford.
They’ve gone there for some privacy because she’s acquainting him with the details of the case and asking for his help. So It’s this amazing moment of drama, just these two people sitting in a punt, from the outside it looks completely innocent, but actually she suddenly noticed his physical appearance in a way she never has before.
She’s finding it attractive and she’s admitting to herself that she does and he knows that she knows and that is instantly embarrassing to her. I think we all know what that kind of acknowledged embarrassment feels like. And it brings us into an aspect of this novel we should discuss as well, which is its status as a romantic novel. This is something that I think people who don’t like the novel so much often cite as one of the reasons why, is that they don’t like the presence of romance and how much of it there is in the book.
It’s obviously something that has been discussed about detective fiction for quite a while at the point when this book is published. We’ve got the rules from the 1920s which variously prohibit romances in a proper fair play detective novel. Sayers is obviously flagrantly breaking those rules here and doesn’t care about it. How did the romance strike you? What did you think of it alongside the mystery?
Leandra: I’m someone who always enjoys a romantic subplot. No matter what book I’m reading. I would argue that to say this is a romance alone or this is the romance at the forefront, I would say that’s a bit too much to say. I would argue it’s a subplot, which is why I didn’t mind it. I enjoyed the refreshing moment where suddenly we’d have a mentioning of Lord Peter Wimsey and I’d be like, oh, let’s see how Harriet reacts to this.
And so I was totally game. I thought it was very fun. And I think it lends to the layers of this narrative. Another strength that Dorothy L Sayers has is painting a picture. We know the environment these characters are in, the descriptions of their demeanors, of the non verbal communication that’s going on between them .
And I also think it speaks to the fact that being at this college, being surrounded by these young people , it almost reverts Harriet and Lord Peter back to this kind of young crush first love feeling being at this punt which arguably could be like a very cute first date and you know they are blushing, his breath is catching because he’s realizing that they’ve caught each other in a look.
I love the layering of that. As mature as they are, as much as they’ve grown in their relationship, being surrounded in this specific environment, they also remind me of undergrads in their freshman year realizing their attraction for each other.
Caroline: I think Sayers is toying with us the whole time with this scene because you know that line I mentioned before no one can bathe in the same river twice.
I do think as well that it’s a romantic book beyond their relationship. I think the way Sayers writes about Oxford is very romantic. She’s, I think, one of the best writers about the physical surroundings and architecture of Oxford that there’s ever been. She clearly loves the place and finds it very meaningful as part of her own life, but she’s still astute and accurate.
There’s a another scene where she walks up Shotover Hill, which is a hill, I think, to the south of Oxford that looks over the city. The city lies in this sort of flood plain basin surrounded by hills, so you can climb up and then look down over it. And Harriet writes this poem, she writes this sonnet about Oxford as the centre of the world, the still point of the spinning world, which I think is beautiful writing, really first class, never improved upon by anybody.
There are also just some wonderful phrases that come up in relation to their relationship that I just don’t think have been bettered. Peter says quite near the end, “anybody can have the harmony if they will leave us the counterpoint”. Which, embroider it on a cushion, put it all over my house, I love it.
He’s talking about Baroque music and his preferences, but he’s also talking about equality and partnership that a pair of people don’t need to be doing everything in harmony. They can be in counterpoint. There can be two themes playing off against each other that are equally important that together make one perfect whole, but they don’t need to be the same and in total step with each other.
So there’s lots of things like that where in one sense, she’s talking about the relationship between these two people, but actually she’s talking about something quite a lot bigger and important just to life in general.
I think we should also talk a bit about something that comes up in relation to this book is the perceived unapproachability if that’s a word of it.
The fact that Sayers likes to pepper Harriet and Peter’s conversation with quotations from literature and poetry and sometimes in other languages that they play these witty games with each other that every chapter in this book opens with a quotation from a poem or a play, there’s lots of little subtle linguistic jokes that Sayers, as a student of classics and modern languages, loved to put in. You were reading this book for the first time with relatively little background in this stuff. We had a whole separate conversation about glossary and Oxford vocabulary that was all new to you.
How did you find that interfered, if at all, with your enjoyment of it?
Leandra: For background on my own experience as far as with the classics and the language, I never ended up learning anything as far as Latin. I wasn’t required to do anything like that. My language experience is with Spanish and Dutch and surprise, it did not help me as far as understanding anything going on.
But I would say that I understand where some people are coming from, especially if you have the type of mind where you want to fully understand something, that it’s hard for you to let a phrase go, let a reference go, without pausing, looking it up, feeling as though you fully understand why it was included in the narrative, and then you can move forward.
I could see why that would be difficult for someone reading this book. I’m someone who, more often than not, I don’t care enough to look it up, so I just carry on, and I was still able to thoroughly enjoy the novel, the epigrams at the beginning of each chapter, while I’m sure quite nice, I just read them quickly, enjoyed them as they were, didn’t think much of it, and continued on, and it did not negatively impact my reading.
I would argue that I didn’t lose anything. I was able to fully understand the mystery. I was able to fully understand the major themes, the relationship between Lord Peter and Harriet. I didn’t end the book saying I wonder how they feel about each other. I knew how they felt about each other. It was fine.
Or I wonder who did it. Oh, I know who did it.
Caroline: I think this book has got a technical vocabulary, just like any novel with a very specific setting might. I recently read a romance novel that was set in the world of Texas Democratic politics. And there were words in that I didn’t know to do with how a caucus works, how a primary functions, how people get elected to state senate.
Not an arena I’m familiar with other than reading news and there were technicalities to it. And yeah, I did google a couple of words, otherwise I was happy to just go with the flow and be like, yes, they are politicians doing politics things. I understand.
It’s a college in the 1930s, academics doing academic things. There are, like a lot of very close knit communities with historical ties, a whole way of speaking has developed around it. I think where it gets coloured is people perceive that as elitist or as if it was a novel about coal miners doing coal mining.
It would not be perceived as elitist that they have a specialist vocabulary to do with their work. I don’t know, I found it interesting to think about it in that way. That it’s just a specialized vocabulary for the specific professional setting we find ourselves in, but it has become very coded in a class and political way, in a way that isn’t necessarily justified, and does not interfere with the enjoyment of the novel.
Leandra: I agree. I think that A common linguistic term is legalese, which is like lawyer speak, obviously, unless you are educated as a lawyer, you may not fully understood certain policies, terms, and you can transfer that to any type of expertise or area of life. If you aren’t from that country, or if you aren’t raised within that political government sphere, you wouldn’t know something to that effect.
There are many parallels in this book, which I absolutely love. And you might not recognize them on your own during your first read, but I look forward to continuing to reread this book eventually, seeing the parallels I can find, and obviously the ultimate benefit is having a person to talk to because we were able to discover things.
So I appreciate you, Caroline, for reading this with me. I know it’s our job, but still, it was very fun to have a little mini book club along with opening it up to the rest of the Shedunnit Book Club.
Caroline: Absolutely. I think this is a book that, matures with you and that you get different things out of it at different stages of life.
Backlisted did an episode about this book a few years ago with Harriet Evans, who I had on the podcast on the library episode. And she referenced how differently she read Gaudy Night before and after she had children, for instance, because there’s the whole discussion in the book about, without children, women with children, married women, unmarried women, and the different intellectual lives that are available to them and how that should work out.
So yeah, I can absolutely see how that experience would change the book for you too and I’m thinking there’s lots of other comparable things that might happen in your life for that to be true as well. So yes, let us bring this discussion to a close here. I could definitely talk about this for many more hours and maybe one day we’ll do a Greatest Hits of the Shedunnit Book Club and we’ll reread some of the best books because I do think this is one of the best books there is.
Thank you very much for reading and talking about it with me.
Leandra: Of course, I had a great time.
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This episode of Shedunnit was written, narrated and produced by me, Caroline Crampton. If you’d like to hear the full hour long conversation about Gaudy Night, or indeed any of the other episodes Leandra have made together, join the Shedunnit Book Club now at shedunnitbookclub.com.
All the books mentioned in this episode are listed in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/ongaudynight. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.
Thanks for listening.
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