(I love this painting. I saw it first on someone’s Twitter, I forget whose, so please accept my apologies if it was you. I feel it beautifully expresses my mood for much of this restricted period. After Breakfast (1890) by Elin Danielson-Gambogi, a Finnish artist whom Wikipedia tells me is best known for her portraits and realist paintings; found here)
Somewhat to my surprise, I haven’t stuck terribly well to my initial coronavirus reading plans. Spending most of your time at home is not so very different to normal life for me, and I’d eagerly thought of it as giving me three extra evenings a week for reading instead of travelling to school and teaching: ideal for tackling some longer and more demanding books I had never quite felt up to. But somehow, it hasn’t worked out quite as I had anticipated. Switching to distance learning has been quite stressful; it’s involved more administration, adaptation and learning than I expected and furthermore a need to reconcile the very differing needs and capabilities of my students with the requirements of the school and the system. And there’s been other stuff too, which isn’t my business to write about here but which has been a struggle.
Still, the pleasant thing about reading plans is that you can toss them aside whenever you fancy and thus although I started No Name as soon as it arrived and love it, I had a bad patch the other day and suddenly the only book in the world I wished to reread was Gaudy Night. Fortunately, I have a copy and it was just the ticket.
I should say here that I am not an unqualified fan of Lord Peter Wimsey. I read quite a few of the Wimsey novels in my early twenties and while I enjoyed them I preferred the more silly-ass incarnation of Lord P to the character he had developed into by Gaudy Night, throwing out quotations from Latin and Elizabethan poetry and being nobly Right about everything. And don’t try to remonstrate by pointing out he has ‘faults’ – they’re the sort of ‘faults’ people claim in job interviews: ‘And what would you say are your weaknesses, Helen?’ ‘Well now I am a perfectionist and find it difficult to stop working outside office hours.’ In fact, far from accepting any of Wimsey’s ‘faults’ that Dorothy Sayers might attribute to him, I have always secretly felt that he was deeply emotionally manipulative. And that marriage proposal! Ew.
However, this was the novel I now felt impelled to read and so I read it. Am I going soft in my old age? Was I unfair to Lord Peter all those years ago? By the end I felt actually affectionate towards him. It was a volte-face to compare with revising my opinion of Raskolnikov* and to be fair to Sayers is a tribute to her talent to write a complex and convincing character who can bear different interpretations.
I also thought that Gaudy Night was a splendid novel. Nominally a piece of detective fiction, the crime or series of crimes is seamlessly interwoven with Harriet’s central dilemma – the dilemma of educated women of her time. Career or marriage? In the 1930s, it was more or less impossible for a woman to have both. So Harriet Vane, still suffering from the notoriety of the murder for which she faced trial, returns to Oxford for her old college’s gaudy. Not all of her encounters with former friends and teachers are happy, but she falls back under the spell of her alma mater and the pleasures of scholarship. When a malicious prankster starts running amok the following term, Harriet is invited back by the fellows to investigate on the rather tenuous strength of her previous brush with justice and her detective novels giving her an insight into this sort of thing. Harriet, charmed by the beauty and intellectual rigour of the academic life, is happy to oblige and as a cover starts researching the gothic novelist Sheridan Le Fanu. But the prankster proves elusive as well as increasingly macabre and Harriet begins to wonder if she can unmask her before something truly terrible happens.
(Undated photograph of women studying at Somerville College, Oxford, I would say roughly contemporary with Harriet Vane’s sojourn; from here)
Sayers uses the spookiness of a college at night, to increase the novel’s creepy atmosphere. The prankster seems driven by a startling malevolence but is unpredictable and directs her hatred at everyone. Fellows, students and staff begin to suspect each other and fear that they will fall victim to the almost supernatural rage. The authorities being unwilling to expose the college to scandal leaves the community isolated and turned in upon itself. The pranks defy any rational, scholarly interpretation. Far from being cerebral, the place simmers with suppressed hysteria.
(Photograph of Somerville College, from here)
And Harriet is also wrestling with the problem of Lord Peter Wimsey, whose annual proposal I have to say still strikes me as borderline stalkerish – although Harriet never entirely dismisses him, either. This time, however, he strikes me as more sensitive, even uncertain, than manipulative, and more natural than poseurish. More than just Wimsey, though, Harriet’s problem is what sort of person she wants to be. Staying at Shrewsbury College allows her to explore an alternative existence, Harriet the Scholar. Like all fantasies, it proves more complex when put into practice. It will also demand sacrifices, which she may not want to make.
There is a beautiful Chinese chess set in a nearby antique shop, which Harriet admires every day as she passes it. When Wimsey begs her to allow him to make her a gift, a proper gift, she chooses that. It’s an interesting moment because Harriet has been struggling for years with her gratitude to Wimsey and the obligations it brings, the complication to their relationship. Can she ever love him if she always has to be grateful to him? By choosing an expensive gift, she seems to relinquish that sense of obligation and allow herself to receive something valuable from him. And she chooses something of high quality, to show that she appreciates him too. Yet, it is something she has no need for and will not really use as she’s hardly a chess player: it’s decorative, even a little showy. Is she accepting his greater wealth? Allowing more frivolity and pleasure into her life? Still holding something back? Perhaps she’s choosing it partly to please him; realising that in receiving, she can give too.
Every part of the novel reflects this central question of mind or heart, and it’s compellingly done, with all the charm of the Oxford backdrop and the drive of detective fiction. I appreciate this novel much more than I did before, I think it’s one of the best detective novels I’ve read. And yes, I like Wimsey better too.
Have you ever changed your mind about a character in a novel?
* When I read Crime and Punishment in my late teens I thought he was a romantic tortured hero. Revisiting the book some twenty years later I discovered he was a spoilt, selfish brat. What will I make of him in my old age?