In Gaudy Night, a classic of the golden age of detective fiction by Dorothy L. Sayers, the heroine, Harriet Vane, wonders whether mystery novels can ever rise to the level of literature. Harriet is a successful author, like her creator, but suffers from writers block. The relationships between her characters were beginning to take on an unnatural, an incredible symmetry. Human beings were not like that. Harriet wonders what might happen if she were to abandon the jig-saw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change.

More than eighty years after Gaudy Night was published, in 1935, were enjoying another golden age of detective stories. Mysteries and true-crime narratives seem to satisfy a need for women in particular, as the journalist Rachel Monroe writes in her new book, Savage Appetites. Stories about the worst things that can happen to a person serve to excavate a subterranean knowledge, Monroe notes, opening up conversations about subjects that might otherwise be taboo: fear, abuse, exploitation, injustice, rage. In 2012, the novel Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, introduced Amy Elliott Dunne, a character whose fury at the false promises of life and marriage prefigured the mass unleashing of womens anger a few years later. Writers like Tana French, Laura Lippman, Megan Abbott, and Celeste Ng have won both popular and critical praise with stories about the damage that the world inflicts on women, and, sometimes, about the damage that damaged women do. The mystery genre, with its plots that patrol the outer borders of believable human behavior, has proved uniquely suited to illuminate a generalized hostility toward women, one so normal and pervasive that its often almost impossible to see.

Many histories of feminist detective fiction find foremothers for todays anti-heroines in the hardboiled sleuths of the nineteen-seventies and eightiesin P. D. Jamess Cordelia Gray, for example, and Sara Paretskys V. I. Warshawski. But Harriet Vane is an earlier, often overlooked member of the same lineage. In a new group biography of Sayers and the school friends who served as her lifelong support system and creative collaborators, The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women, the historian Mo Moulton shows Sayers setting out in Gaudy Night, her most psychologically astute and least conventional novel, to present her own philosophy of womens intrinsic intellectual equality.

Set at Oxford in the fictional womens college of Shrewsbury, Gaudy Night investigates a string of acts of vandalism and threatening letters sent to students and faculty. Its a romance as much as a mystery, in which the cerebral Harriet comes to terms with possessing both a heart and a brain, and accepts her feelings for her partner in crime-solving, the droll and debonair Lord Peter Wimsey. The genteel atmosphere of Sayerss Oxfordwhere the key clue is a quotation from Virgils Aeneid, and where Peter and Harriet take a break from their case to go puntingexists in a different universe from the eerie pageantry of Flynns Missouri or the saturated dread of Frenchs Dublin. But Sayerss subject cut close to the bone in her own day. As suspicion falls on Shrewsburys female faculty, the quarry that Harriet calls the College Poltergeist becomes a spectre of the eras worst fears about educated, professional women. In unmasking the culprit, Harriet, and thus Sayers, vindicates a womans right to a life of the mind.

Harriet only accepts Peters affections when it becomes clear that he respects her profession. On the subject of her writing, he is, she thinks, about as protective as a can-opener, telling her bluntly, You havent yet... written the book you could write if you tried. Sayers seems to have intended this advice for herself as much as for Harriet. Gaudy Night was her attempt to prove that detective fiction could address human problemsespecially the problem of how a woman can know herself and her ambitions in a world where sexism obscures them from view.

Sayers didnt begin her career with the intention to write mysteries. Moultons book opens at Oxfords Somerville College, the inspiration for Shrewsbury, in 1912, a few decades after women were first allowed to enroll at the university. As undergraduates, Sayers and a few friends formed what they jokingly termed the Mutual Admiration Society, or M.A.S., a clique of aspiring poets and playwrights who critiqued one anothers drafts over hot cocoa.

The M.A.S. was originally apathetic toward the political cause of womens equality, declining to join the campaign for suffrage. Still, as upper-class, educated women, Sayers and her friends were simultaneously insiders and outsiders in their professional milieus, Moulton writes, arguing that this duality was formative: I suspect they would have been somewhat boring men. Sayers, for example, would likely have become an academic if the posts available to women scholars in the early nineteen-twenties hadnt been so provisional and scarce. Moulton concludes that the M.A.S.s marginality within the gender politics of their era served a role like sand in an oyster. They struggled and were pushed out of the main lines of promotion and success, and, instead of reproducing the world of their fathers or their mothers, they made something new.

Many educated women of Sayerss generation became either wives or teachersor they taught until they married. Beginning her adult life during the First World War, Sayers found herself ill-suited for either option. Its immoral to take up a job solely for the amount of time one can spend away from it, which is what most of us do with teaching, she wrote to a friend, in 1917. But her attempts to support herself as a poet and publishers apprentice produced a kind of nightmare of financial instability. After passing a case of mumps by reading pulp detective novels, Sayers tried her hand at writing her own mystery. In Whose Body?, published in 1923, she created the erudite, aristocratic Lord Peter, the protagonist of what would become a wildly popular series. She dreamed up her hero in an admittedly escapist frame of mind, Moulton writes, giving him a posh flat full of antique books and a butlerall the luxuries and comforts that she could not afford.

Sayers couldnt have chosen a more lucrative genre. In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, mysteries were ubiquitous as mass entertainment. They were also synonymous with a jigsaw-style formula. Even as Sayers grew prosperous from Lord Peters exploits, she nursed a level of disdain for her chosen profession. Make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression, she writes in the introduction to The Omnibus of Crime, an anthology of stories that she edited in 1929. She argued that the question of how to unite intricate plots with characters who read like real human beings was itself a mystery that writers had yet to solve, adding, At some point or other, either [the characters] emotions make hay of the detective interest, or the detective interest gets hold of them and makes their emotions look like pasteboard.

If this question occupied Sayers in the early years of her career, so did a series of personal trials, which Moulton recounts in The Mutual Admiration Society. Sayers was not born a feminist, Moulton writes. She became one, through bitter suffering and the stark realization of the precariousness of her position. (She remained skeptical of the label feminist even after it fit.) The first wakeup call was a disastrous love affair with a novelist named John Cournos. Sayers hoped that the relationship would lead to marriage and children; from Cournoss letters, Moulton summarizes his desires as unconditional sex and total submission. Next, Sayers had an affair with a married man that resulted in an accidental pregnancy. Lacking any good optionit was 1923, and abortion was illegal and dangerousthe thirty-year-old Sayers chose to keep the child a secret, sending him to live with a cousin. When Sayers later married, the union was not as harmonious as the one she would invent for her fictional characters. Atherton (Mac) Fleming, a journalist and photographer, seems to have viewed his wifes success with ambivalenceeven though, or especially because, her earnings supported him.

Moultons book sheds new light on Sayerss evolution as a writer, showing how some of her best work occurred in collaboration with her friend Muriel St. Clare Byrne. (For one thing, the dynamic between Peter and Harriet may have been modelled on Byrnes equitable romantic partnership with another woman.) Sayers and Byrne are the most compelling characters in Moultons group biography, which also includes subjects who lived much smaller lives; not all the material adheres to the promise of the books subtitle, which is to show a circle that remade the world for women. But chapters about Sayers and Byrnes work on a play featuring Peter and Harriet shows how that process altered Sayerss own writing. In the play, Busmans Honeymoon, written at the same time as Gaudy Night, Sayers challenged herself for the first time to craft a convincing romantic arc for her charactersand the play changed her approach to what she called the psychological elements of stories. She began defending her genre against the charges of empty escapism that she had once levelled at it. In a lecture from 1936 titled The Importance of Being Vulgar, she responded to critics who derided her work as lowbrow, insisting that detective fiction could capture such vulgarities as birth, love, death, hunger, grief, romance, & heroism.

A collection of Sayerss published works, in 1957.

In her introduction to the 1929 Omnibus, Sayers had lamented the state of the fictional female detective. Most were charming creatures... of twenty-one or thereabouts who solved their cases through the mystical property of feminine intuition and gave up detective work at books end in order to get married. Others, like Agatha Christies Miss Jane Marple, were skilled amateurs rather than respected professionals. The really brilliant woman detective has yet to be created, Sayers writes.

Harriet only partially fills the vacuum that Sayers identifiedshes an amateur detective to Peters semi-professional, and its he who assembles the cluesbut Gaudy Night lays the groundwork for the beloved women sleuths of future generations. The archetypal detective is a figure who values truth above all else: above empathy for victim or villain, love of friends or family, even the preservation of her own life. As Cassie Maddox, a protagonist of Tana Frenchs Dublin Murder Squad series and a new BBC adaptation, says in the The Likeness, from 2008, The detectives god is the truth, and you dont get much higher or much more ruthless than that. In Gaudy Night, women scholars argue bitterly about whether their work can ever come before family. But faced with the case of a male historian supporting his wife and children on a falsified find, they all agree that he must be reported; they value the historical record over the well-being of the mans family. Sayerss women are ruthless enough to be trusted with real work.

In the best detective stories, the truth thats uncovered isnt limited to the name of the culprit. Mysteries, like works of horror, transmute nebulous fears into tangible dangers. The genre lends itself to exploring anxieties about the unknown and unknowableshadowy territory that, for Harriet and many of the detectives whove followed, includes the contents of their own minds, or the substance of their own personalities.

Sayerss most cherished feminist commitment is that our true selves are tied up in our talents: that every person, regardless of gender, has a type of work for which theyre intrinsically suited, and that the ethical choice in life is, as Harriet says, to do ones own job, however trivial. In Gaudy Night, the typical marriage encompasses a womans existence completely, which is why Harriet, cursed with both a heart and a brain, has chosen the latter, believing that its impossible for a woman to balance both. But her self-abnegation, far from enabling her work, frustrates the fulfillment of her artistic potential, turning her books into lifeless intellectual exercises. Meanwhile, women who choose heart over brain face a worse fate. Making another person ones lifes work has a devastating effect... on ones character, as a member of the Shrewsbury faculty tells Harriet. It means being devoured, robbed of a rightful role in society as surely as a ghost lacks a foothold on earth. The scholar warns against underestimating women who have undergone this hollowing. Far from despising them, she says, I think they are dangerous.

Gaudy Night hints that most marriages are a form of spiritual femicide. Gone Girl, in which a villainous female protagonist escapes her airless marriage by faking her own death, takes that metaphor to its logical conclusion. In the most famous passage of Flynns novel, Amy explains how her husband, Nick, set her disappearing act in motion the moment he fell in lovenot with her but with the person that men expect women to be: the Cool Girl... the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesnt ever complain. Amy argues that, faced with a real person where he expected the Cool Girl, Nick dismantled her in search of the woman he thought he married. He took away chunks of me with blas swipes: my independence, my pride, my esteem. I gave, and he took and took. He Giving Treed me out of existence. Amys lament is that of an everywoman, but her actions are those of a psychopath. Her idea of poetic justice is to frame Nick for her murder: He killed my soul, which should be a crime. Actually, it is a crime. According to me, at least.

Nick doesnt know the real Amy, and this enigma is the engine of Gone Girl. In Gaudy Night, as mounting evidence suggests that the poltergeist must be one of the esteemed members of Shrewsburys faculty, Harriet begins to fear that theres truth in the fulminations of sexiststhat women who choose head over heart are somehow dangerous. She doesnt know if shes drawn to the idea of a life with Peter or just anxious about being a woman alone. If you want to do without personal relationships, then do without them, Peter says. Dont stampede yourself into them by imagining that youve got to have them or qualify for a Freudian case-book. But Harriet cant discern her own motivation, and self-doubt begins to send her mind haywire.

Here, Gaudy Night hits on the reason that mysteries feel tailor-made for writing about sexism: because sexism, like other forms of prejudice, has a way of making people mysteries to themselves. Who would we be in the absence of internalized biases and psychological injuries? This question sits at the heart of the best crime thriller of the last decade, Tana Frenchs The Witch Elm. The narrator, Toby Hennessy, is the golden boy for whom everything goes right. Only after a series of unlucky turns does Toby begin to realize that his identity has always been as contingent on fortune and circumstance as everyone elses. While he was skating through high school, the cousins he grew up with were being tormentedone for being gay, the other for being a bookish girl who rejected the violent advances of a popular boy. As surely as those assaults shaped their victims, Toby was defined by his failure to notice. As one of the cousins says, Im never going to know what I would have been like if you had had my back, that time. The not-knowing, as the other cousin points out, is the worst part of all: the idea that I was who I was because of some random guy I just happened to meet.... Like anyone could turn me into anything, and there would be nothing I could do about it. At first, Toby resists the idea that random chance could remake a person. When he realizes that this is exactly whats happening to him, he feels like hes falling through the floor of the warm bright world that hes always known, into the strangling dark of another one.

Alongside contemporary writers like French and Flynn, Sayers seems almost quaintly optimistic. The vandal of Gaudy Night" is revealed to be not a member of the faculty but an opponent of womens educationnot an allegory of womens intellectual unfitness but a manifestation of an irrational hatred. When Harriet understands that shes free to choose a life of pure head and no heart if she wants, she can finally see the work that shes meant to do. She commits to a nontraditional marriage and an unconventional detective novelwhich, after many reworkings, she deems nearly satisfactory and almost human.

By catching her poltergeist, Harriet performs an exorcism on her own fear. Her literary descendants are rarely so lucky. Their mysteries have a way of pulling them down into the dark underside of reality that Toby discovers. Wherever the case leads, the end finds them still living there.

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An Overlooked Novel from 1935 by the Godmother of Feminist Detective Fiction - The New Yorker