And recently I was called a “bitch” and a “bad reader” for trashing John Irving’s In One Person. I spoke out against “Amazon affiliates” and got even more grief. I once said something about Persephone books (or was it Virago?) that upset quite a few bloggers who every few months declared it Persephone Week (or was it Virago Week?). Jason Silverman’s wrote in article in 2012 about the pressure on the internet to be “nice,” i.e., uncritical.
Indeed, I have never been forgiven by a Virago group, or perhaps it was a Persephone group, for gently mocking the constant Virago and Persephone reading weeks.
I have seen perfectly nice online groups splinter over very insignificant matters. But social media can be risky, and even online book discussions can be contentious. I rarely see this kind of comment at book blogs, and fortunately am under the radar at Mirabile Dictu. The beautiful Rumer Willis, one of the finalists on Dancing with the Stars this season, has said that she was “bullied” on social media about her unconventional looks (and, indeed, some of these horrifying tweets were shown on this DWTS episode). Oddly, it is TV-watching that has brought this issue to my attention. Usually I read for character, not plot, but what strikes me on my third reading of Gaudy Night is the very contemporary problem of the poison pen. He also wishes he could retreat to Oxford, but the world exists there, too. He got a first at Oxford, which Harriet had not known. And it turns out that Peter, exhausted by work at the Foreign Office, has a similar temperament. Harriet, who has always been improbably annoyed by Peter’s attentions, becomes more vulnerable and sympathetic as she seeks a refuge in scholarship at Oxford, only to be tormented by fear again. The women at the college, who pride themselves on their independence in the 1930s when women’s education was not the status quo, ironically need a man to solve the case.Īnd yet, despite this clichéd business of the women’s failure to find the perpetrator, Sayers deepens the psychology of her characters. Her long-time suitor, Lord Peter Wimsey, the amateur detective and star of most of Sayers’s novels, comes to her aid. The heroine, Harriet Vane, a tormented mystery writer who was tried and acquitted for the murder of her lover, returns to her alma mater, Shrewsbury College, a women’s college at Oxford, to investigate a poison pen writer who is also playing poltergeist. The elaborate plot is disturbing and hyperrealistic. Gaudy Night is not Dorothy Sayers’s most amusing mystery, but it is undoubtedly her most brilliant literary novel.
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