12 Reasons the Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries Should be on Your 2017 Reading List

Cover to Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers. Image via Open Road Media, digital publishers of this edition.

3. Feminism

Although we’ve already spoken in brief about the role of women in the novels, here we’d like to take a moment to discuss one book in particular: Gaudy Night. Unsurprisingly, it’s one of the stories in which Harriet Vane appears.

Gaudy Night features Harriet’s return to a fictional college at Oxford — you’ll recall here that Sayers also went to that university — in order to investigate some interesting events. By “interesting events”, we mean that some threats are going around. This college is also an all-female school.

In what’s clearly a complete coincidence, Gaudy Night came out 20 years after Sayers graduated from Oxford.

In other words, the idea of women in higher education was still a relatively new one, and the need to be representative means that Harriet can’t even call in the police. If you don’t think that Lord Peter eventually shows up, though, we’ll remind you again whose name is on top of this series.

However, most of the book belongs to Harriet as she contemplates her life since leaving school and the previously mentioned role of women in education. If you absolutely refuse to start at the beginning, we figure that Gaudy Night should be your first choice.