Dorothy L. Sayers | Articles in Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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the novels of, [32] 82; Gaudy Night, [63] 49

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Vane Hopes

Victoria Neumark on the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers

I always wanted to marry Peter Wimsey. Lord Peter Wimsey, that is. Me and Dorothy L. Sayers, both. Perhaps that’s where our love lives (separately) went wrong. However, I can say that Wimsey has never let me down. The clue’s in the name. From the family motto – ‘As My Whimsy Takes Me’ – to the long sensitive hands which play music and bowl cricket balls with equal ease, the beaky profile and the straw-coloured hair, the tormenting war history and passion for John Donne, not to mention the aristocratic birth and the fabulous wealth – here is a man made to fit.

Hauntings

Michèle Roberts on Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

Aged 14, I read Gaudy Night simply as a tantalizing romance masquerading as a thriller. Rereading it now I see it as a ghost story, its form demanded by its subject matter. The ghosts float across the text as metaphors that are not merely decorative, as elements of style, but fundamental to the plot, which has to do, crucially, with language, written and spoken: language stolen, repressed, destroyed.

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