Gaudy Night
When Harriet Vane attends her Oxford reunion, known as the Gaudy, the prim academic setting is haunted by a rash of bizarre pranks: scrawled obscenities, burnt effigies, and poison-pen letters, including one that says, "Ask your boyfriend with the title if he likes arsenic in his soup." Some of...
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When Harriet Vane attends her Oxford reunion, known as the Gaudy, the prim academic setting is haunted by a rash of bizarre pranks: scrawled obscenities, burnt effigies, and poison-pen letters, including one that says, "Ask your boyfriend with the title if he likes arsenic in his soup." Some of the notes threaten murder; all are perfectly ghastly; yet in spite of their scurrilous nature, all are perfectly worded. And Harriet finds herself ensnared in a nightmare of romance and terror, with only the tiniest shreds of clues to challenge her powers of detection, and those of her paramour, Lord Peter Wimsey.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780062196538 (0062196537)
ASIN: 62196537
Publish date: October 16th 2012
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
Pages no: 544
Edition language: English
Series: Lord Peter Wimsey (#12)
"Gaudy Night" is a beautifully written exploration of the importance and difficulty of personal choice, of the nature and relevance of academic life, of the possibility of finding love and the difficulty of deserving it, wrapped up in a mystery set in an all-female Oxford College in 1935. ...
This book is only nominally a mystery. What it really is is Dorothy Sayers's manifesto, which holds that educating women is valuable, that women can be scholars, that work is work whether it is done by men or women, that intellectual work is valuable in it's own right, and that women should have age...
The triumphant return of reading notes! This month, I plan to re-read and talk about four mysteries by Dorothy Sayers. Specifically, those which feature both Harriet Vane & Lord Peter Wimsey, since Harriet + Peter = otp forever. As always, these posts may (will!) contain massive spoilers so beware i...
Wimsey makes an appearance, but this is definitely Harriet Vane's story. She's gone to see some old classmates and attend the opening of a new building in her college at Oxford, fully prepared to have a difficult time as the graduate-who-was-on-trial-for-murder, and a notoriously "fallen" woman who'...
I went into this knowing this was the Wimsey mystery where Harriet finally falls in love with him and says yes. I also knew that it was about harassment in an all-female Oxford college, and talked a lot about women's place in the world. What I wasn't expecting: the long, meaty passages where Harri...