We’re back to recommendations from Jo Walton here and it’ll be one of the rare books I read that aren’t science-fiction or fantasy. It’s also really old, being first published in 1935 and apparently is still in print. It’s actually the tenth book in a series of detective novels that mostly feature Lord Peter Wimsey as the main character. But as the foreword here notes most of these books are fairly standard staples of the genre and it isn’t until this book that the author Dorothy Sayers reached for something more.

Several years after she has been cleared of a murder charge, mystery novel writer Harriet Vane visits her old alma mater, Shrewsbury College in Oxford for a reunion. She is welcomed warmly despite her notoriety but later finds a poison pen letter in her gowns accusing her of being a murderess. Some time later, the Dean of the college writes to inform that similar letters have been sent to both students and dons and there have been incidents of vandalism as well. Fearing a scandal if this were to be made public, she asks Vane to quietly investigate the matter. Meanwhile Vane wonders if she should ask Peter Wimsey for help. Wimset is of course the man who cleared her of the murder charges and though he persists asking her to marry him she has always declined, fearing that her debt to him for saving her would set their marriage on the wrong footing.

I had some difficulties reading this book including the fact that it’s fairly long. Some of the vocabulary used is new to me as well, not because they are archaic but because they’re specific to the Oxford community in which the novel is set. So a gaudy is an alumni reunion and a scout is a kind of housekeeper. Even so I was surprised by how readable it is and how easily I was sucked into its world. More daunting is the large cast of characters, consisting mainly of the unmarried female dons of Shrewsbury College plus various servants and students. As this is indeed a mystery novel and much of the fun lies in sifting through alibis and motivations, keeping track of who’s who is rather important but it is at times challenging to tell them apart. Fortunately only a relatively small number of people turn out to actually matter much to the plot so it all works out if you persevere past a very confusing start.

Unlike most mysteries here, the crimes here seem comparatively mild. There is no murder and not even any theft. It begins with poison pen letters and rude drawings, escalating later to acts of vandalism such as tearing pages out of books and smearing paint on the walls. It is only when the perpetrator fears that Harriet Vane is getting close that there is a sense of danger. Yet this only makes the premise all the more unique and interesting. The all female Shrewsbury College is newly established, meaning that the male dominated university has only deigned to admit woman scholars on an equal footing with men not too long ago. They fear therefore that scandal may undo this progress and it only gets worse when Vane’s investigation clears the student body of suspicion and raises the possibility that the embittered party may be one of the female professors. The stakes therefore are very real and given how social justice is at the forefront of our minds today highly relevant.

The college serves as a battleground for the many conflicts and debates over the subject of female education. Vane for example is dismayed to find that her best friend during her own college years has, after marrying a farmer and having children, lost all of her old intellectual curiosity and vigor and immediately realizes that they can no longer be friends. Most of the teaching staff are sympathetic to women in dire straits, such as widows with children, and so are willing to extend them special consideration as employees. One teacher however, Miss Hillyard, argues vehemently that this is all wrong and that if there is a conflict between the needs of the position and one’s own personal needs, then one must put the job first or else not take it up at all if they are to be seen as fully equal with men.

The novel returns time and again to the observation that married life for women seems to invariably mean abandoning personal ambitions and intellectual pursuits in favor of caring for the husband and children and indeed these professors are all spinsters. They must contend with the old saw that asexual old maids are bitter and perhaps mad while some do still long to find a man who is able to accept them as intellectual equals. The themes are rich, complex and their handling is incredibly well thought out by the author. At the same time, the novel is a romance as Vane grapples with her feelings for Peter Wimsey and in the end turns to him for assistance when she fails to crack the case. Even the perpetrator, once caught, points out the irony of them needing at the end to turn to a man to solve the case.

The introduction in the edition that I read, written in 2016 by an actress who played the character of Harriet Vane in a television show, points out that the character is an obvious author insert and so Wimsey is her ideal man who she never met in real life. Sayers was indeed one of the first women to graduate from Oxford and so while Shrewsbury is fictional, this account of Oxford life seems to be very real indeed. One complaint that I have, and that I see has been often repeated, is that Wimsey is too perfect a man to be real, being multi-talented, highly esteemed for his service to the British government, incredibly rich and completely devoted to Vane. Vane herself is a more reasonable character, being not especially good at music or sports, being intelligent enough to collect all of the facts but not being able to look past her own biases to solve it. It’s telling that Sayers chose to create so flawless a man for her surrogate and hence herself.

All the same, this is easily one of the best novels I’ve ever read. It has excellent prose that at times plays with language as befits a main character who is herself a writer, its debates about women’s education makes it philosophical, and though the word never appears in the book, it is very much a feminist novel that is far ahead of its time. It is so good that it makes me think that I ought to read more mainstream fiction.