5/28/2023 0 Comments Wimsey gaudy night![]() ![]() The elaborate plot is disturbing and hyperrealistic. The heroine, Harriet Vane, a tormented mystery writer who was tried and acquitted for the murder of her lover, returns to her alma mater, Shrewsbury College, a women’s college at Oxford, to investigate a poison pen writer. When Sayers began writing her Peter Wimsey stories in 1923, she fashioned a descendant of Sherlock Holmes, though with a monocle, much more charm, and a passion for quotation. Gaudy Night is not Dorothy Sayers’s most amusing mystery, but it is undoubtedly her most brilliant literary novel. ![]() But which of the apparently rational, respectable dons could be committing such crazed acts? When a desperate undergraduate, at her wits' end after receiving a series of particularly savage letters, attempts to drown herself, Harriet decides that it is time to ask Lord Peter Wimsey for help. Gaudy Night is not Dorothy Sayers’s most amusing mystery, but it is undoubtedly her most brilliant literary novel. For all of Gaudy Night ‘s heavy lifting in regards to women’s roles and moral questions about human nature, it is a witty and suspenseful mystery novel. 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 and one of them involves a long Latin quotation, which makes Harriet suspect that the perpetrator is probably a member of the Senior Common Room. ![]()
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