Gaudy Night

Explanation of the novel's title

"Gaudy" derives from the Latin gaudium and Old French gaudie, meaning "merry-making" or "enjoyment". A college gaudy at Oxford is a meeting for former members. The phrase "gaudy night" is taken from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra:

Let's have one other gaudy night: call to me / All my sad captains; fill our bowls once more / Let's mock the midnight bell.

Plot summary

Harriet Vane returns with trepidation to Shrewsbury College, Oxford to attend the Gaudy dinner. Expecting hostility because of her notoriety, she is surprised to be welcomed warmly by the dons, and rediscovers her old love of the academic life.

Some time later the Dean of Shrewsbury writes to ask for help. There has been an outbreak of anonymous letters, vandalism and threats, apparently from someone within the college, and a scandal is feared. Harriet, herself a victim of poison-pen letters since her trial, reluctantly agrees to help, and spends much of the next few months in residence at the college, ostensibly to do research on Sheridan Le Fanu and to assist a don with her book.

As she wrestles with the case, trying to narrow down the list of suspects and avert a major scandal, Harriet is forced to examine her ambivalent feelings about love and marriage, along with her attraction to academia as an intellectual (and emotional) refuge. Her personal dilemma becomes entangled with darkly hinted suspicions and prejudices raised by the crimes at the college, which appear to have been committed by a sexually frustrated female don. Harriet is forced to re-examine her relationship with Wimsey in the light of what she has discovered about herself. Wimsey eventually arrives in Oxford to help her, and she gains a new perspective on him from those who know him, including his nephew, an undergraduate at the university.

The attacks build to a crisis, and the college community of students, dons and servants is almost torn apart by suspicion and fear. There is an attempt to drive a vulnerable student to suicide and a physical assault on Harriet that almost kills her. The perpetrator is finally unmasked by Wimsey as one of the college servants, revealed to be the widow of a disgraced academic at a northern university. Her husband's academic fraud had been exposed by an examiner, destroying his career and driving him to suicide. The examiner has since moved to Shrewsbury College, and the campaign has been the widow's revenge against intellectual women who move outside what she sees as their "proper" domestic sphere.

At the end of the book, Harriet Vane finally accepts Wimsey's proposal of marriage. (Their wedding and honeymoon—interrupted by another murder mystery—are depicted in Busman's Honeymoon.)

Characters in Gaudy Night

Literary significance and criticism

Although no murder occurs in Gaudy Night, it includes a great deal of suspense and psychological thrills. The narrative is interwoven with a love story and an examination of women's struggles to enlarge their roles and achieve some independence within the social climate of 1930s England, and the novel has been described as "the first feminist mystery novel".

Jacques Barzun: "Gaudy Night is a remarkable achievement. Harriet Vane and Saint-George, the undergraduate nephew of Lord Peter, help give variety, and the college setting justifies good intellectual debate. The motive is magnificently orated on by the culprit in a scene that is a striking set-piece. And though the Shrewsbury dons are sometimes hard to distinguish one from another, the College architecture is very good. Note a reference to C. P. Snow's The Search, and sound views on counterpoint versus harmony."

Gaudy Night deals with a number of philosophical themes, such as the right relation between love and independence or between principles and personal loyalties. Susan Haack has an essay on Gaudy Night as a philosophical novel.

Women's education

The issue of women's right to academic education is central to the book's plot. The lecturers of Shrewsbury College are veterans of the prolonged struggle for academic degrees for women, which Oxford granted only reluctantly; Sayers herself took part in this struggle. The Fellows of the college are surprised and a bit dismayed at the attitude of their students, who take for granted this right for which such a hard struggle had to be fought.

In fact the struggle was not yet completely won. Some of the male senior members of the University were still not happy with women getting degrees; the proportion of women in the University was restricted by statute to no more than 25% (a restriction which was only removed in the 1970s); women were segregated in women's colleges such as Shrewsbury, while the prestigious historic colleges remained exclusively male; women's colleges were starved of funds and run on a shoestring.

Publication of such going-ons as happen in the book (poison-pen letters, vandalism, the near-suicide of a student and near-murder of a Fellow) would discredit and severely damage Shrewsbury College in particular and the cause of women's education in general. Therefore, all this must be kept secret – which rules out any approach to the police or other outside agency.

For most of the book, it is assumed that the perpetrator is mentally deranged and that this is a sufficient motive. But as it turned out, the perpetrator's acts were deliberate and calculated. The perpetrator had two motives. The first was to exact retribution from an individual working at Shrewsbury College who she believed had unjustly harmed her and her family. The second was to damage the college and women's education. If Shrewsbury College could not suppress the mischief, the perpetrator hoped to demonstrate that women were incapable of managing professional organisations and that women's education was a failure.

International background

A subplot in the book is Peter Wimsey's role as an unofficial envoy of the British Foreign Ministry, called upon to help defuse international crises when more conventional diplomats have failed. For much of the book he is in Italy (in Germany in the TV adaptation), dealing with a major crisis which for a time seemed to threaten the outbreak of a new European war (as he tells Bunter). Though not explicitly named, this was clearly the Abyssinia Crisis, and the reference would probably have been clear to readers at the time. The book reflects the mindset at the time of writing, when the outbreak of the Second World War had not yet come to seem inevitable.

In the frame of the book's plot, Wimsey's diplomatic obligations serve as a plot device to keep him away from Britain, and leave Harriet on her own for most of the book, to try to solve the mystery at Oxford without his help.

Film, TV and theatrical adaptations

The book was adapted for television in 1987 as part of a series starring Edward Petherbridge as Lord Peter and Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane. A reference to Chancellor Brüning dates the adaptation to the 1930-32 period, several years earlier than the novel.

In 2005, an adaptation of the novel was released on CD by the BBC Radio Collection to finally complete the run of Wimsey adaptations begun with Whose Body? in 1973; the role of Harriet was played by Joanna David, and Wimsey by Ian Carmichael.

In 2006, a theatrical adaptation was created by Frances Limoncelli and directed by Dorothy Milne at Lifeline Theatre in Chicago.

The plot of Gaudy Night was adapted to become the two-part Out of the Past episode (#155 & #156) of the American television mystery series Diagnosis: Murder starring Dick van Dyke as Dr. Mark Sloan. The episode first aired on 11 May 2000.