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Wimsey gaudy night5/8/2023 ![]() It is perhaps Sayers’s richest novel, in terms of incident and humour, but is less satisfying as a detective story than the previous two novels. Sayers considered it the book in which she most successfully integrated setting, plot and theme to form a whole (“Gaudy Night”). Gaudy Night emphasises characterisation and theme over plot it is “a novel not without detection”, rather than a detective novel. The themes and the plot march hand in hand-as it appears Harriet and Wimsey walk towards the altar. The villain is extremely well hidden, but satisfying and inevitable: the motive is the logical consequence of all that has gone before: all the careful presentation of a way of life, a world, and the intelligent discussions of women’s place in the world and of principle vs. ![]() ![]() The whole story is nearly all seen from the perspective of Harriet Vane (apart from a few brief scenes from Wimsey’s), who has returned to Oxford for the Gaudy, and finds herself called back to investigate a poltergeist-cum-poison-pen. ![]() ![]() It scores full marks as both a novel and a detective story. Eight years later, older and wiser I am able to recognise it for what it is: very long, very talky, and very, very good. When I first read Gaudy Night at the age of thirteen, I found it extremely dull and pompous, stuffed with pretentious conversation and without a murder above all, it was (shudder!) a romance. ![]()
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