justice of her scholar husband's career decline and suicide upon one Miss de Vine, a noted Oxford scholar who some years earlier had exposed the husband's deceitful scholarship and caused him to lose his college degrees and career opportunities. Miss de Vine, for her part, had only thought of the threat to good scholarship, and not of the consequences that would issue from destroying the family man's career. The story takes place in the fictional Shrewsbury College at Oxford, comprising a wholly female population that is overwhelmingly celibate and virginal in the older generation of career scholars and instructors.
In Gaudy Night, there is a good deal of focus on Shrewsbury as a community or society of women that is different from society at large. Confined to that community, they are accepted by the mainstream, but they do not have access to it, as Miss Hillyard notes: "Look at this University. All the men have been amazingly kind and sympathetic about the Women's Colleges. Certainly. But you won't find them appointing women to big University posts" (Sayers 51). The English postwar experience of professional women appears to have been roughly equivalent to that of the women in Gaudy Night, but in France, women have since the war had greater access to the political and educational mainstream: "In France, organized lay teachers were among the most active of female union members" (Boxer and Quataert 193).
The background of the story, like the main plot, is decisively concerned with the tension between what is now called home and career, a tension that is never a question for men but persistently one for women. The texture of Gaudy Night arises because Sayers's heroine Harriet Vane, a successful mystery novelist and alumna of Shrewsbury, is asked to solve the mystery of who is behind the terror campaign that initially seems aimed at all of the career scholars at the College but eventually is found to be aimed at Miss de V...