Gaudy Night
On New Year's Eve, Jonah told me in the comments to read Dorothy L. Sayers, starting with Strong Poison and not stopping before Gaudy Night. I did as I was told. I finished Gaudy Night on Thursday, on the bus home, and missed my stop, and walked back up the hill in the rain not minding at all.
If you haven't read them: Harriet Vane is a detective novelist. In Strong Poison she's on trial for poisoning her lover, and Lord Peter Wimsey, who's investigating, falls in love with her across a courtroom and proposes on his first visit to her in prison. She says no. She keeps saying no, for years and two more books. In Gaudy Night, published in 1935, she goes back to her old women's college at Oxford for a reunion dinner, the Gaudy of the title, and finds the place being quietly tormented by someone writing poison-pen letters. She stays to find out who.
It's a mystery, and a good one. But it's really about a question Harriet can't stop asking: whether a woman can have work she loves and a person she loves, without one of them eating the other. The college is full of women who chose the work, some happily and some not. Outside it are women who chose the other thing, some happily and some not. Harriet has spent years being told, by the world and by her own past, that she'll have to pick. What Sayers does, slowly and with enormous patience, is let her find out whether that's true.
I'm not going to say how it ends, though anyone who's read it knows the two words in Latin I mean.
I'll just say that I recognized more of myself in Harriet than I'd have liked. Not the trial. The habit of guarding the work as if anyone who came close might take it. The way she can't quite believe that someone could want her to keep writing. I've never been asked to choose between the two things, exactly. I've only noticed, at eleven at night, which one I'm still at the desk for.
Sayers was writing about it in 1935, and I'm reading her on a bus in 2022, nodding. I'm not sure whether that's comforting.
What book have you read that seemed to know something about you it had no business knowing?