Can one be both an independent woman and a wife? Is a life of scholarship somehow unnatural for women? What is female education for? As one of the characters asks: “Some of these clever ladies are a bit queer don’t you think, madam?”įor the educated, middle-class women born in the 1890s, such questions loomed large. Lying beneath the crime story is a whole ocean of seething anxieties. Lord Peter, who is being kept firmly at arm’s length, is horribly alarmed he thinks real violence isn’t far away. Or one of the servants … Suspicions abound. ![]() Or perhaps the culprit is one of the dons herself, “the outcome of repressions sometimes accompanying the celibate life”. ![]() Perhaps, the modern reader might think, it’s the 30s version of internet trolls threatening clever women who speak their minds. There, a series of poison pen letters begin to arrive, notes composed in language so obscene that the English don, the unworldly Miss Lydgate, can’t understand it – “the worst she knows comes from Restoration drama”. In Dorothy L Sayers’s marvellous crime novel Gaudy Night, published in 1935, Harriet Vane – the sometime murder suspect beloved by the amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey – returns to her old Oxford college, a place very like Sayers’s own alma mater, Somerville.
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