Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers
Gaudy Night is full of clothes satisfaction, and other kinds too. Caroline Crampton of the Shedunnit podcast says it is one of the most popular but also one of the most polarising of Golden Age books of the 1930s. I have already featured it many times on the blog, but it so full of clothes...
I am going to repeat my verdict
from a long-ago post:
Gaudy Night should by all standards be a tiresome book. There is no murder, and when the culprit for the various vandalistic crimes is revealed it is not at all convincing that her revenge would take this form. There are endless scenes where DLS puts her own opinions into approved characters’ mouths, and then has (less clever and attractive) others arguing with those views and being defeated.
But the book has a special place in the affections of hard-core
fans of Dorothy L Sayers – even though there are also long descriptions of the
day-by-day running of a women’s college in the 1930s, and the social AND
intellectual snobbery run unchecked. Good sociological interest, as we like to
say when we can’t really explain why we like books.
And for some of us the most memorable scene is punting on the
Cherwell. Here is Harriet, on her way to meet Lord Peter:
The Dean, meeting her under the beeches, gazed with
exaggerated surprise at her dazzling display of white linen and pipe-clay. ‘If
this were twenty years ago I should say you were going on the river.’
‘I am. Hand in hand with a statelier past.’
Pipe-clay is what you would use to whiten shoes or any leather
(much used in the army, and for tennis shoes, trade-name Blanco, so people also
talked of Blanco-ing their white goods)
Don’t look too closely - the picture below of a punt under the trees is
by John Singer Sargent, and shows a mother and child, but somehow to me it has an impressionistic look of Peter and
Harriet.
Going back to the beginning of the book – Harriet revisits her
all-women college in Oxford for a Gaudy, a reunion celebration – this is
Shrewsbury College (of course not Somerville...). The visit leads to her
investigating an outbreak of poison pen letters and vandalism. For this first weekend,
she brings two important frocks. The black one is for the daytime reception, full-length and quite formal. I’m cheating again with this one – it
looks to me like a dress with an academic gown over the top, if you look
quickly, but the extra folds are just part of the dress.
Her gown for the formal dinner in the evening is described as petunia-coloured, so I double-checked my instinct that this was pinky-purple and discovered through many a horticultural website that petunias come in every imaginable shade – no limits – but that this hybridization was very much something that developed in the 1930s. So Sayers was being quite reasonably specific in 1935.
And I will finish Gaudy Night with some students in their caps and half-wearing, half-carrying their gowns in the street.
And an Oxbridge student of around the right age – this photo made me think of Harriet going off to Shrewsbury with “my college fees and my clothes and five pounds a term to make whoopee on”.
Perhaps it's the academic in me, Moira, but I've always liked the setting for this novel. Things have changed in academia since then - drastically - but there's still something about it. And you're right about the clothes...
ReplyDeleteI think we both love an acadmic setting in a book Margot! Works every time doesn't it?
DeleteIt's one of my favourites, I think because of the setting. Great photos!
ReplyDeleteYes - every time I read it I wonder if I will like it less, but the opposite is true.
DeleteFunny, but Gaudy Night remains one of my favorite Sayers books, perhaps because there is no murder -- I kept waiting for it -- and because the school descriptions are wonderful. I loved academic life, excepting exams and paper due dates, and might be there still, studying cultural history, if it had worked out (paid).
ReplyDeleteAlso, the punting scene, the dean's room, the male shirt fronts that pop, oh, all of it.
Your Somerville College room photo matches my vision of Miss Vane's room uncannily, excepting the window seat, which is a value add.
Your pick for Harriet's linen suit...close, but I'd add more pleats, so as to get in and out of punts more easily while remaining ladylike.
Thank you for bringing up the book again. Am nearly due for a reread.
Very best from across the pond where it is May, but awfully dark, Natalie
Thank you for your lovely comment, I love just the same things about it, and the same scenes.
DeleteI had about four pictures of ladies in white, and what I really wanted was features from each of them combined, to try to match my mind's eye. Perhaps I should have put in all four illos so people could choose the one closest to their own vision. A different one had a very good punting hat... the one above isn't quite right... Oh the decisions!
I read this book when I was just beginning college, it helped me through homesickness and other first-year blues. My school was also a women's college, but it bore no resemblance to Shrewsbury! I liked Sayers' views on women's education and careers (which still seemed rather progressive in the 1970's over here).
ReplyDeleteI read it in my last year of school, while planning and preparing to go to college. EXACTLY like you, it bore absolutely zero resemblance in the end, but it most certainly made me think this was going to be a wonderful thing, that I would love going away to a different life, and that was very true.
DeleteI find a useful thing to remember is their conclusion that you must penalize people who make mistakes in serious matters, even if it was accidental, because otherwise you leave the way open for people to do it deliberately, to defraud or fake it. I haven't put that very well (unlike DLS) but I'm sure you know what I mean. It is a useful philosophy to remember, and I think of it quite often - I am, I think it's fair to say, someone who is fairly un-judge-y, and very prone to letting people off for this and that, but I use this as a yardstick to decide if it is a case where there's a need to be more strict.
I also love academic settings. Reunions are much more common in the US (I am co-chair of mine, which meets for 3 days every five years but we plan interim events in Boston or online quite often) and usually involve the students from one's year, not everyone from the university (although other years may be there, meeting separately). Of course, Lord Peter and his nephew add a distinctive appeal to this book as well.
DeleteThere is a university in Tennesee called Sewanee where I think students still wear their academic gowns to class (probably thrown over their jeans). I always thought it was a great tradition! https://new.sewanee.edu/campus-life/connecting/order-of-the-gown/
Yes I gathered from American friends that it was much more standard there, and at set periods. And providing a great setting for fiction, films, crime stories etc. It's all much more haphazard in the UK, certainly outside Oxford and Cambridge. And even there, less of a big deal now than it used to be.
DeleteFascinting and unexpected about the Sewanee! In my day there were a few occasions when gowns were expected, and there were men who would turn up wearing a tshirt or rugby shirt, gown over the top, sometimes a tie round the collarless neck - and I used to think they looked rather dashing...
I've read fairly recently an American mystery set at a Harvard reunion - the event kicks off with a fancy-dress parade through the town, each of the year groups having selected a costume which they all wear (so the protagonist's year are all dressed as Superman). Not sure what the Somerville College faculty would make of that! I can't remember much else about the book, frustratingly - January Jones is in my head as the protagonist but that's an actress from "Mad Men" so can't be right.
DeleteSovay
That is quite the setting for a reunion - and also for a crime book, ideal.
DeleteBut I can't see it in the UK somehow, and definitely not at Oxford.
The central theme - the paramount importance of truth - could hardly be more relevant now in the face of ‘fake news’ and politicians who expect everyone to believe that the truth is whatever expedient thought happens to flit through their mind at any given moment. Time for a re-read though I seem to have lent my copy to someone … I do recall Harriet’s careful choice of the black dress to complement the academic gown, contrasted with one of her contemporaries who’s gone for something frilly in lemon yellow.
ReplyDeleteSovay
Yes you are so right. Depressing.
DeleteDLS had a great eye for clothes, and (always) strong opinions.
Only tangentially related...but a favorite character of mine who "had never developed spiritually since the days of cocoa-parties in a bed-sitting room at college" was Mrs. Tebben, a recurring Thirkell character who made her first appearance in August Folly. She earned a first in some branch of economics and augmented the family income by writing earnest textbooks on the topic; yet (married to a husband who was apparently a mid-level civil servant and Icelandic-saga hobbyist and with two children to raise) never overcame the need, real or perceived, to practice revolting domestic economies. Luckily she acquires an admirer in Oxford-bound Betty Dean, who plies her with questions about college life. (Favorite dialogue, when Betty asks about the conceited Miss Pitcher-Jukes, the [pre-marriage] Mrs. Tebben's academic rival and apparently queen bee of their school circle. "‘A bit of a Lesbian, I suppose,’ said Betty. ‘Oh no, my dear,’ said Mrs. Tebben, who was secretly frightened of the word and thought it had perhaps something to do with drugs, ‘but she certainly had a very great influence over her fellow-students.'") -- Your blogfriend Trollopian
ReplyDeleteExcellent reminder of Thirkell's bitchiness and wide range of subjects to lay into!
DeleteUntil the 1980s, women at Oxford and Cambridge were massively outnumbered by the men: in the first half of the 20th century they were reputed to be dismissed by the male students as dowdy bluestockings, and the chaps preferred to find their girlfriends elsewhere. But that changed, say post-WW2, and then the women found themselves very much in demand. Jilly Cooper is somewhere quite cutting about women who 'never got over being the toast of Lady Margaret Hall', and were astonished to find that out in the world they weren't seen as massively attractive. All this is of course complete generalization, and typical of a world we hope has disappeared, where women are judged on their ability to attract men - but there most certainly was a kernel of truth in it.
Looking at your photo examples, I am reminded of Miss Millbanks who was declaring publicly that she was only a scholar because she would not be seen dead in the ridiculous short gown of a commoner.
ReplyDeleteHow did I forget that one? One of the strangest remarks in the book, one that really startled me in my pre-university reading of it. Didn't she make sure she got no money with the scholarship? The epitome of social and intellectual snobbery.
DeleteIt means she excelled academically https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/dress
DeleteCalling is snobbery is despise for intelligence and ambition.
The snobbery lies in her deterination to make it clear to everyone else that she was very clever, very rich, thought appearances important, and wasn't a commoner. To me that is not attractive behaviour.
Delete