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This full-cast audio dramatization of Gaudy Night was specially recorded for BBC Radio. When Harriet Vane attends her Oxford reunion, known as the 'Gaudy, ' the prim academic setting is haunted by a rash of bizarre pranks: scrawled obsentities, burnt effigies and poison-pen letters--including one that says, "Ask your boyfriend with the title if he likes arsenic in his soup." Some of the notes threaten murder; all are perfectly ghastly; yet in spite of their scurrilous nature, all are perfectly worded. And Harriet finds herself ensnared in a nightmare of romance and terror, with only the tiniest shreds of clues to challenge her powers of detection--and those of her paramour, Lord Peter Wimsey.… (plus d'informations)
PhoenixFalls: A Civil Campaign is Lois McMaster Bujold's attempt to replicate Gaudy Night -- with an infusion of Georgette Heyer -- in her long-running Vorkosigan Saga.
littlegreycloud: A murder mystery, an academic setting, an unusual heroine, a knight in shining armour (although John McLeish is more believable than Lord Peter;): check, check, check and check. But most importantly: really good writing.
themulhern: "Death at the President's Lodging" is a more fun book about people running about an English college in the 1930s in the middle of the night.
Book # 10 in the Lord Peter Wimsey series focuses not on Peter, but on Harriet Vane.
Harriet arrives at Shrewsbury College, Oxford, for the annual celebration known as Gaudy Night. She is one of the alumnae, though hardly typical, remaining single and earning her living as a mystery writer, while keeping company with Lord Peter Wimsey, whose proposals of marriage she keeps declining. But what promised to be a pleasant, if sometimes awkward, homecoming, turns decidedly ominous with a series of destructive “pranks” and malicious, vile graffiti.
This seemed very slow and plodding for a mystery, and I wasn’t terribly interested in much of it. Lord Peter is off on some secret assignment, and difficult to reach, though Harriet does manage to get him to come to her aid when she’s unable to capture the “poltergeist” on her own.
There were times when I was ready to applaud Sayers’ efforts at focusing the story on the women – not just the students and staff of Shrewsbury, but the alumnae who were also present. There certainly were plenty of suspects and the perpetrator seemed able to vanish without a trace. But the series is focused on Lord Peter Wimsey, after all, so he had to make an appearance. Still, I was irritated that it was HE who finally solved the case. And the speech the culprit gave once caught, a diatribe on “women’s place at home, caring for her man and not taking jobs as should be his,” just set my teeth on edge.
Ian Carmichael is a talented actor, and he plays Lord Peter in the BBC series based on these books. But with the focus on Harriet and the women of Shrewsbury, I think the audiobook would have been better if narrated by a woman. ( )
Re-read, November 2021: There’s so much to take in with this book, and even though I’ve read it 3 or 4 times now, every time it still feels like a fresh peeling back of the layers and trying to understand. It’s a bit more complex than what I can competently parse, but I do love it so. —————————— Original review:
The dialogue and prose in Gaudy Night is some of the richest I have ever read. It's very dense and it takes time to understand it, but that's what creates such a connection between me and this book. Hours after finishing the last page, phrases from it still roll around in my head to be savored.
This volume contains the resolution for a romantic relationship three books in the making, and, incidentally, one of the most thoughtful adult relationships I can recall in fiction. Much as I enjoy reading about the Mr. Darcys and Mr. Rochesters of the literary world, you can have them all and leave me Lord Peter Wimsey. He's the one with the real power of mind, heart, and words.
I have heard that Dorothy Sayers, having created her detective and slowly endowed him with great complexity, more or less fell in love with him, and created a match for him in "Harriet Vane," a stand-in for herself. It wouldn't surprise me at all. His blend of intelligence, compassion, wit, honesty, affectation, nervous energy, and control is unique, contradictory, and hardly imaginable in the real world, but very appealing. I also love Harriet Vane a lot. Her honest analytical mind is only enhanced by her all-too-relatable emotions as she tries to work out whether it is possible to balance the demands of brain versus heart.
Favorite passage: "I suppose one oughtn't to marry anybody, unless one's prepared to make him a full-time job." "Probably not; though there are a few rare people, I believe, who don't look on themselves as jobs but as fellow-creatures." ( )
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
The University is a Paradise. Rivers of Knowledge are there. Arts and Sciences flow from thence. Counsell Tables are Horti conclusi, (as it is said in the Canticles) Gardens that are walled in, and they are Fontes signati. Wells that are sealed up; bottomless depths of unsearchable Counsels there.
John Donne
Dédicace
Premiers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Harriet Vane sat at her writing-table and stared out into Mecklenburg Square.
[Introduction] I came to the wonderful detective novels of Dorothy L. Sayers in a way that would probably make that distinguished novelist spin in her grave.
[Author's Note] It would be idle to deny that the City and University of Oxford (in aeternum floreant) do actually exist, and contain a number of colleges and other buildings, some of which are mentioned by name in this book.
Citations
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
'The social principle seems to be,' suggested Miss Pyke, 'that we should die for our own fun and not other people's.' 'Of course I admit,' said Miss Barton, rather angrily, 'that murder must be prevented and murderers kept from doing further harm. But they ought not to be punished and they certainly ought not to be killed.' 'I suppose they ought to be kept in hospitals at vast expense, along with other unfit specimens,' said Miss Edwards. 'Speaking as a biologist, I must say I think public money might be better employed. What with the number of imbeciles and physical wrecks we allow to go about and propagate their species, we shall end by devitalising whole nations.' 'Miss Schuster-Slatt would advocate sterilisation,' said the Dean. 'They're trying it in Germany, I believe,' said Miss Edwards. 'Together,' said Miss Hillyard, 'with the relegation of woman to her proper place in the home.' 'But they execute people there quite a lot,' said Wimsey, 'so Miss Barton can't take over their organisation lock, stock and barrel.'
`Were you really being as cautious and exacting about it as you would be about writing a passage of fine prose?’ ‘That’s rather a difficult sort of comparison. One can’t, surely, deal with emotional excitements in that detached spirit’. ‘Isn’t the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?’ ‘Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it’s dead right, there’s no excitement like it. It’s marvellous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day – for a bit, anyhow.’ ‘Well, that’s what I mean. You expend the trouble and you don’t make any mistake – and then you experience the ecstasy. But if there’s any subject in which you’re content with the second-rate, then it isn’t really your subject.’
All the children seem to be coming out quite intelligent, thank goodness. It would have been such a bore to be the mother of morons, and it's an absolute toss-up, isn't it? If one could only invent them, like characters in books, it would be much more satisfactory to a well-regulated mind.
Detachment is a rare virtue, and very few people find it lovable, either in themselves or in others. If you ever find a person who likes you in spite of it--still more, because of it--that liking has very great value, because it is perfectly sincere, and because, with that person, you will never need to be anything but sincere yourself.
...never again would she mistake the will to feel for the feeling itself.
All women are sensitive to male criticism. Men are not sensitive to female criticism. They despise the critics.
"The trouble is," said the Librarian, "that everybody sneers at restrictions and demands freedom, till something annoying happens; then they demand angrily what has become of the discipline."
She resented the way in which he walked in and out of her mind as if it was his own flat.
"Lord, teach us to take our hearts and look them in the face, however difficult it may be."
...there is only one kind of wisdom that has any social value, and that is the knowledge of one's own limitations.
'The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.'
She went to bed thinking more about another person than about herself. This goes to prove that even minor poetry may have its practical uses.
The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realize the deadliness of principles. To subdue one's self to one's own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one's self to other people's ends was dust and ashes.
"Placetne, magistra?" "Placet."
"Miss Lydgate's `History of Prosody' was marked PRESS with her own hands this morning. I fled with it and seized on a student to take it down to the printers. I'm almost positive I heard a faint voice crying from the window about a footnote on page 97 -- but I pretended not to hear."
There's something hypnotic about the word tea. I am asking you to enjoy the beauties of the English countryside, to tell me your adventures and hear mine, to plan a campaign involving the comfort and reputation of two hundred people, to honour me with your sole presence and bestow upon me the illusion of Paradise--and I speak as though the pre-eminent object of all desire were a pot of boiled water and a plateful of synthetic pastries in Ye Old Worlde Tudor Tea Shoppe.
Harriet agreed that intellectual women should marry and reproduce their kind; but she pointed out the English husband had something to say in the matter and that, very often, he did not care for an intellectual wife.
Derniers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
He primly settled his white bands and went upon his walk unheeded; and no hand plucked his velvet sleeve.
[Introduction] But for the balm that reassures one about surviving the vicissitudes of life, one could do not better than to anchor onto a Lord Peter Wimsey.
[Author's Note] For, however realistic the background, the novelist's only native country is Cloud-Cuckooland, where they do but jest, poison in jest: no offence in the world.
Références à cette œuvre sur des ressources externes.
Wikipédia en anglais
Aucun
▾Descriptions de livres
This full-cast audio dramatization of Gaudy Night was specially recorded for BBC Radio. When Harriet Vane attends her Oxford reunion, known as the 'Gaudy, ' the prim academic setting is haunted by a rash of bizarre pranks: scrawled obsentities, burnt effigies and poison-pen letters--including one that says, "Ask your boyfriend with the title if he likes arsenic in his soup." Some of the notes threaten murder; all are perfectly ghastly; yet in spite of their scurrilous nature, all are perfectly worded. And Harriet finds herself ensnared in a nightmare of romance and terror, with only the tiniest shreds of clues to challenge her powers of detection--and those of her paramour, Lord Peter Wimsey.
▾Descriptions provenant de bibliothèques
Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque
▾Description selon les utilisateurs de LibraryThing
2.5***
Book # 10 in the Lord Peter Wimsey series focuses not on Peter, but on Harriet Vane.
Harriet arrives at Shrewsbury College, Oxford, for the annual celebration known as Gaudy Night. She is one of the alumnae, though hardly typical, remaining single and earning her living as a mystery writer, while keeping company with Lord Peter Wimsey, whose proposals of marriage she keeps declining. But what promised to be a pleasant, if sometimes awkward, homecoming, turns decidedly ominous with a series of destructive “pranks” and malicious, vile graffiti.
This seemed very slow and plodding for a mystery, and I wasn’t terribly interested in much of it. Lord Peter is off on some secret assignment, and difficult to reach, though Harriet does manage to get him to come to her aid when she’s unable to capture the “poltergeist” on her own.
There were times when I was ready to applaud Sayers’ efforts at focusing the story on the women – not just the students and staff of Shrewsbury, but the alumnae who were also present. There certainly were plenty of suspects and the perpetrator seemed able to vanish without a trace. But the series is focused on Lord Peter Wimsey, after all, so he had to make an appearance. Still, I was irritated that it was HE who finally solved the case. And the speech the culprit gave once caught, a diatribe on “women’s place at home, caring for her man and not taking jobs as should be his,” just set my teeth on edge.
Ian Carmichael is a talented actor, and he plays Lord Peter in the BBC series based on these books. But with the focus on Harriet and the women of Shrewsbury, I think the audiobook would have been better if narrated by a woman. (