Peter fell in love with her during the trial and proposed to her.

She was introduced in an earlier novel in which she was saved from the hangman’s noose by Lord Peter after being mistakenly charged with the murder of her former lover. The book is the 10th in Sayers’ series of novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, her aristocratic amateur sleuth, but the first to be told entirely from the point of view of Harriet Vane, herself an author of detective fiction.

Though it carries all of those things with it, Gaudy Night is also a cracking detective story: a locked-room mystery in which the room is the fictional Oxford women’s college of Shrewsbury, the suspects the college’s staff and senior members, and the crime not a nice, neat murder, but a spiteful, sticky jumble of vicious pranks and poison pen letters. And above all, it’s about the age-old question (which at the time of writing was a fresh, new one) of whether it’s possible for a woman to have it all: to have a life of the mind and of the heart, and to do equal honour to them both.Īll of which makes the book sound like very heavy weather – but it isn’t, not at all. It’s about class and sex and society between the wars. It’s about love and integrity, and the thought and work and consideration that must go into establishing and maintaining a relationship of equality and mutual respect. It’s about writing: what it means to write well and how to do it. It’s about friendship, and how it ebbs and flows as you yourself grow – or stop growing. It’s about truth, and the need, in a slippery, shifting world, to find the one true thing you’re willing to defend, no matter what the personal cost. It’s a novel about work and the moral value of work the importance – indeed the necessity – of finding the job you’re fitted for and doing it to the very best of your abilities. The book feels so fundamental to me, now, that I find it hard to cast my mind back to a time when I hadn’t read it, and harder still to explain what it’s about, because it seems to be about everything. When he gave me the book, therefore, I thanked him vaguely and forgot all about it until, halfway through the train journey home and in lieu of alternative entertainment (this was during the pre-smartphone era), I dug it out and cracked the spine. I’d never heard of Sayers before I wasn’t much of a crime aficionado (I’m still not), and my acquaintance with Golden Age detective fiction to that point had been limited to the 1980s TV series of Miss Marple, which my grandma used to let me stay up to watch.

“You’ll like this,” he said, pulling it off a bookshelf as we were leaving after a weekend’s visit. I first came across Dorothy L Sayers’ Gaudy Night about a decade ago, when my ex-boyfriend’s father pressed a copy on me.

Wimsey gaudy night