Every so often, one must reread a book to see if it is indeed as good or great as you have remembered. Or maybe you are going to the movie and want a refesher on how the book really is better. Or in this case a play. I just finished Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers. I can not remember how many times I have reread it, but each time I get something else out of it. It still is a mystery in the Lord Peter Wimsey series, but mostly with Harriet Vane and not so much Lord Peter. The book still assumes that everyone has taken Latin and knows where all the starting chapter quotations are from. And there is that annoying Latin bit at the very end of the story - that no matter how many times I have had it translated - it does not satisfy me. But get past all that, and there is a story of the love of scholarship and a university setting. Education for education's sake. And a bit of a mystery tossed in for good measure.
Sayers was a scholar herself - Dante - and this book shows her love of the place that got her started - Oxford. And who doesn't remember their college days as sometimes wondrous and brain expanding times (knowledge - folks, not drugs!) The feeling that you have just been shown/taught the concept that runs the rest of the world or, that will become your personal mantra, is a feeling that is suppressed when you have been out of academia for awhile in the "real world." Perhaps that is why so many people choose academia?
Harriet Vane and Sayers get caught up in the questions that are still being debated over 100 years since women have been admitted to higher education. Should a woman have a career or a family? What will higher education do to her place in the world? What would Sayers think - she being in the group of the women graduates that first went to Oxford- of today's graduates? The irony is that in 2006, more women are going to college than men. Now if we can figure the rest of it out...
Enjoy the read.
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