Gaudy Night - Women's Education

Women's Education

The issue of women's right to academic education is central to the book's plot. The lecturers of Shrewsbury College are veterans of the prolonged struggle for academic degrees to women, which Oxford granted only reluctantly (Sayers herself took part in this struggle). The lecturers are surprised and a bit dismayed at the attitude of their students, who take for granted this right for which such a hard struggle had to be waged.

And in fact, the struggle is not yet completely won. Some of the male lecturers in Oxford are still not happy with women getting degrees; the number of women in the University is restricted by statute to no more than 25% (a restriction which would only be removed in the 1970s); women are segregated in special women's colleges such as Shrewsbury, while the prestigious historic colleges remain exclusively male; women's colleges are starved for funds and run on a shoestring.

Publication of such going-ons as happen in the book (poison-pen letters, vandalism, the near-suicide of a student and near-murder of a lecturer) would discredit and severely damage Shrewsbury College in particular and the cause of women's education in general. Therefore, all this must be kept secret - which rules out any approach to the police or other outside agency.

For most of the book, it is assumed that the perpetrator is mentally deranged and that this is a sufficient motive. But as it turned out, in fact all these acts were carried out by deliberate design, with the conscious intention of causing just such a discrediting of women's education. Ironically the perpetrator turns out to be a strong, assertive women, capable of taking bold initiatives and setting the agenda for everybody else - and making use of all this to aggressively promote a violently anti-feminist agenda.

Even had she been so inclined, Annie could never have pursued an academic career, since she could not have afforded the high tuition fees. Her one route of social mobility out of her working-class origin was through the traditional way of marriage. This Annie took, becoming a professor's wife - only to have a woman scholar destroy her husband's career, drive him to suicide, and thus push Annie herself back down to the status of a servant. Thus, Annie's strong drive to take revenge on women scholars in general and on Miss de Vine in particular is perfectly comprehensible, and in fact does not in itself prove her to be mentally deranged. However, it is as such that she is ultimately treated - rather than being prosecuted in an open trial (which she might have welcomed) Annie is discreetly packed off to a private asylum.