Thinking about Dorothy Sayers Gaudy Night, & how so much of my impressionable youth adored Harriet, but I realize more & more I am Miss Lydgate, the English prof with a perpetually incomplete book, who knows human sin & error very well in fiction, but find it hard to condemn it in those she meets.

Harriet Vane was my first literary crush. Then they made a trio of television adaptations with Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane and my crush was confirmed.

Lovely. I am Miss Meteyard from A Murder Must Advertise. “Some people can be funny without being vulgar, and some can be both funny and vulgar. I should recommend you to be either the one or the other.”

I have gone from fantasizing about a union of true minds that overcomes past trauma to find equal footing in the unchanging stones of collegiate Gothic architecture to just hoping that I get Miss Lydgate’s happy ending: mss sent off to press.

I love Miss Lydgate but honestly the whole SCR are overly relatable

Gaudy Night one of my all time faves. We can be friends. :)

I reread Gaudy Night earlier this year for the first time since becoming a faculty member and it is a completely different (but equally lovable) book!

I had the absolute delight of playing Miss Lydgate in a read-through of the radio script, once. I tend to feel more like Catherine Bendick most of the time, but that's much less of a bad thing than Sayers made it out to be.

Ooh I've been meaning to reread that one, I'll have to see how I relate to it these days.