![]() ![]() “Closely encompassed and complete.” I like that. It was all so long ago so closely encompassed and complete so cut off as by swords from the bitter years that lay between. Sayers captured this sense of visiting a previous self, one untested and less well-formed than the self you currently inhabit and the anxiety it produces, perfectly. I’m not who I was then and he wouldn’t recognise who I am now. ![]() ![]() ![]() What caught me by surprise is the emotional impact. I hadn’t read the two Harriet Vane books that preceded “Gaudy Night” yet, within a few pages, I learned a lot about Harriet: her history, her character, her mode of thought. In a few pages I’d already decided that I liked Harriet Vane and wanted to spend time in her company and that I admired Dorothy Sayers’ skill in creating empathy for and engagement with an introspective intellectual woman working her way through emotions that she’s trying to hold at arms-length.ĭorothy Sayers did so much with so few words. I was in the book’s thrall before the end of the first chapter. I took it on faith, as I had abandoned the first Peter Wimsey book “Whose Body?” because it seemed to me to be a chaotic farce. I’d been told, repeatedly, that this was a wonderful book. 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. ![]()
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