Christians Reading Classics
Christians Reading Classics
Dorothy L. Sayers - Gaudy Night with Carolyn Weber
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Nadya Williams and Carolyn Weber explore the literary significance of Dorothy L. Sayers' 'Gaudy Night', discussing its themes of women's roles in academia, the intersection of murder mysteries and theology, and the nature of what constitutes a classic. They look into Sayers' complex character, her contributions to literature, and the broader implications of her work in the context of 20th-century society.
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SPEAKER_01The year 1935 was, in retrospect, spectacular for the quality of books published. Laura Ingalls-Wilder published Little House on the Prairie. Sinclair Lewis published It Can't Happen Here, and we've featured both of these books on previous episodes this season. But let's face it, readers can take only so much wholesome family life or dystopian political reflection. Readers need some murder mysteries in their lives, too. And so, one of the most popular books of that year was Dorothy Lee Sayers, latest installment in the series of murder mysteries featuring Lord Peter Whimsey. We're speaking here of Gaudy Night. In this novel, Sayers' female protagonist and Lord Peter's love interest, Miss Harriet Vane, takes the front stage as she goes back to Oxford for a college reunion at the fictional All-Women's Shrewsbury College. There, she investigates a crime that may or may not be a murder. Here is how she contemplates this possible visit at the beginning of the novel. Memory peopled the quad with moving figures. Students sauntering in pairs, students dashing to lectures, their gowns hitched hurriedly over light summer frocks, the wind jerking their flat caps into the absurd likeness of so many jesters, coxcombs. Bicycles stacked at the porter's lodge, their carriers piled with books and gowns twisted about their handlebars, the college cat, preoccupied and remote, stalking with tail erect in the direction of the buttery. It was all so long ago, so closely encompassed and complete, so cut off as by swords from the bitter years that lay between. Could one face it now? What would those women say to her, to Harriet Fain, who had taken her first in English and gone to London to write mystery fiction, to live with a man who was not married to her, and to be tried for his murder amid a roar of notoriety? That was not the kind of career that Shrewsbury expected of its old students. Welcome to Christian's Reading Classics, a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy. I am Nadia Williams, books editor at Mirror Orthodoxy and interim director of the Master in Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Ashland University. Today I have the delight and privilege of talking with Carolyn Weber. She is a literary scholar, professor at New College Franklin in Franklin, Tennessee, and the award-winning author of multiple books. I will mention one in particular. If you haven't read her memoir, Surprised by Oxford, you need to ditch whatever other plans you had for this weekend and just read it. And then you can watch the 2022 film based on her book, available on Amazon Prime Video, by the way. But today we're going to talk about another romance set in Oxford, that of Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Whimsey. So thank you for being with me today.
SPEAKER_03Oh, thank you so much for having me, Nadia. What a joy.
SPEAKER_01Oh, what a joy. Yes, I've been really looking forward to this. So uh this first season of the podcast focuses on literary classics with a significant anniversary this year. And of course, Gaudy Night just turns 90. But I want to open with a somewhat more abstract question before we get to Gaudy Knight. What is a classic?
SPEAKER_03Oh, isn't that a great question? Um, I think I mean I would agree with Samuel Johnson, the classic, in a sense, is a work that survives the test of time, right? It's it um it continues to speak to us. Uh I mean, I think the canon has shifted and changed according to readers' tastes and things like that. But I think at the core, many classics remain um or are pulled back in regularly because they speak to what it really means to be human, you know, the the profound decisions we we are faced with, uh choosing um um choosing purpose and intention and meaning. Uh, I think that they raise those kind of questions, whether they're tragedy or comedy. Um, so I I do think there's obviously debate over canon for sure, uh, and you know, Western literature, all those sorts of things. But overall, I think that a classic endures because it over time continues to speak to what is most human in us.
SPEAKER_01I love that. And especially like in the age of AI, I feel like that specter is always in the background of these conversations now.
SPEAKER_03Mm-hmm. I would agree. Absolutely. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Well, let's start with a little bit of background about this stage in Sayers' life. So this is her tenth Lord Peter Whimsy novel. And when she started writing mysteries, she was a copy editor for an advertising firm. But that's in the past now, right? Like where is she mentally, emotionally, spiritually to the extent that we know?
SPEAKER_03Oh gosh. Well, I think with Sayers, you know, what's so fascinating about her is we see her being one of the only, the earliest women to have even graduated from Oxford and um to be given a degree. So she was uh, I think a really fascinating person because she was highly literate, obviously, highly educated and um and complicated, right? You know, she worked in lots of different circles and uh and so and also had this um, I think deep faith that bumped up against what it could be, uh, what it was to be creative as well. So yeah, I mean, there's so many facets of her personality um that I was thinking about that come across in the different projects that she did. Uh, but I think that because she was, on one hand, you know, this famous for her detective novels eventually, uh, but she had written these amazing theological works. A lot of times people don't know that. And what she was brought in to do by the BBC and the radio, too, in terms of the life of Christ, all those things happening while she was also, I think, um, you know, someone who had uh known what it was like to be in a tumultuous relationship, had had um, you know, a child out of wedlock, uh, that she uh was trying to raise through her sister, I believe, and you know, an aunt and and um that came to attention later. So she had, you know, she had, I think, a lot of um Hutzpa. Yeah. You know, and had a lot of um intellectual training, but I think also had this uh love for life, you know. Um you know, she even called it sort of this this you know, rage for life in a sense. So she's um she's a really fascinating person.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I was thinking like it's so easy to appreciate her brain, but she had a whole like life around it.
SPEAKER_03Right, right. And I think that many critics have said, oh, you know, her um her apologetics is too brainy, it's too intellectual, it's perhaps um, you know, removed. She did have friends like the Inklings, you know, she did um move in circles because there weren't many others uh able to participate in those circles. You know, she was a polyglot, she was um, you know, she translated Dante, she uh worked on dramatizing the life of Jesus, you know, and also wrote these um other novels. But she's um, yeah, I think there's but I do think that there's much heart to her because she was really what I find really moving in her apologetics is the reminder that uh we really take the gospel for granted. Um, you know, when she talks in Creator Chaos and and uh the idea that um that the gospel story, that the story in the Bible is the most amazing, most um incredible drama that we have. And we have underestimated the story of Jesus, we've undersold it. Uh that we're so busy telling people what they should uh, you know, what how they should be more virtuous and how they should go to Sundays, how they should go to church on Sundays, and we're not talking to them actually about really how radical the message was that Jesus brought and embodied and the drama, as she says, you know, the the drama and the dogma. So I think she brings a lot of heart to things. I just think that she was also highly intellectual. And I and I think it was also a very loaded and complicated, interesting time to be writing, you know, during the war and post-war too, Naughty, you know, as well, with everything that was going on, what she was trying to explore. I think in many ways she was bringing her great and mighty intellect to exploring topics that were not being touched upon and still are being, you know, just newly explored, like PTSD. Um, how do we make our faith relevant to our lives? Uh, how do we actually deal with things like um attraction and um vices and virtues and things like that as well in terms of our own hearts? I think that was one of her big draws to Dante. So she's yeah, I think she's highly intellectual, but she uh we do have to read her her novels differently. I think they are harder work, but I also think that she was very interested in asking people the right questions.
SPEAKER_01I love that. And now you're making me think like, how do we square her apologetic writing with her murder mysteries?
SPEAKER_03I I don't think it's that strange. I mean, I think in a way, murder mysteries are a really fascinating genre. I have always wanted to write one. I just don't have the imagination as Gurtis it for reality. So I I I sort of borrow from that instead. But I I think murder mysteries by themselves are a very revelationary, you know, revelatory um genre. We're trying to figure out what happened. And um, and we're always trying to discern meaning. Uh they they're usually modeled after the highest crime, right, which is which is murder. Um, and if not murder, something similarly heinous or frightening. So we're trying to discern meaning out of chaos, and we're trying to figure out an answer to good and evil. Um, so I don't think that they're necessarily so oppositional to theology. And I also think that like the other writers in her time, especially when you look at the Inklings group, right? So many of them were writing all different types of genres. I mean, you look at Lewis, his his uh he's writing um fantasy and theology and essays and children's stories, and you know, um, and so I think her breadth of genre just really again speaks to her intellectual ability, but also her sense that faith is pervasive. It's not something that you wrap up in a box and put aside for Sundays. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And again, it speaks to her brilliance, really, like that whole crew, that group. Yes, exactly. And um, I'm reminded that, of course, another um slightly earlier brilliant theologian of uh the early 20th century also wrote murder mysteries, and that's of course GK Chesterton, who's right, absolutely Father Brown.
SPEAKER_03Yes, yes. Uh so there's there's definitely um an interesting connection there.
SPEAKER_01Well, let's get into this novel proper. So without giving away the ending. Oh, that's hard.
SPEAKER_02I know, that's hard. That's always where you want to go. I know, yeah. Spoiler alert in case we don't know.
SPEAKER_01Um, I mean, to be fair, to be fair, listeners did have 90 years to like pick this book up. So we could always say it's their own fault if like no. Um, but what is the premise here and what is a gaudi anyway? What is this gaudy night?
SPEAKER_03Oh, gaudy. Well, that's a great fun. I mean, Gaudium, it's joy. So, like, in a sense, a a Gaudi uh is a celebration of um, usually it's a celebration, like a homecoming, I would say, equivalent. Um in in so in Oxford colleges, it's usually where the alumni come back uh for um a festive weekend of celebrating and reuniting. So it's a bit like a reunion, you know, a glorified high school reunion, but they're quite fun because they might be certain years or a couple of different years or you know, might be a great group. Um, so they're known for being quite festive. And I think it's fun that she sets her novel in with Gaudy Night because um, I mean, I think it's actually the line is taken from Anthony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra. So there is a fun tradition there, but it it is a sense of revelry, um, partying, joy, reunion, but it's also a sense of nostalgia, you know, people who've been there some time ago coming back. Um, as she even makes the reference, you know, women that are older coming back and trying to be younger, um, which I think we all do in a way, but also this wonderful sort of revisitation of, you know, we're what we once had, what that joyfulness of being young, um, that uh I think that the uh particularly undergraduate or early graduate years represent of um just sort of unfettered joy and study and youth and stealing food from the buttery and you know, in the middle of the night, and um that kind of freedom, that kind of lack of any sort of um, you know, fetters before you're into the weight of adulthood. And so for someone like Harriet Bain, I think it's particularly interesting for her to come back on Gauddy Night because she's what what Sayers has done is created sort of a double setting. So you have the college, but then you also have the college um embodied by the past, and you have her now coming back to a place that's both familiar and unfamiliar, right? Which is the the epitome of the uncanny description of the uncanny, if we think of right. So uh it's always interesting coming back to a place that's familiar, but it's no longer home. Um there are people she recognizes and people you know she studied with and and um former professors and things, and then there's new students and young students, and then there's a circle that knew her, and she's coming back too with the previous history of what's happened to her. If you read A Strong Poison just beforehand, you know, where she's been held on a murder trial for her lover. So she's coming haunted herself and um and possibly you know already being sort of judged and entering that that um that community. And and I think it also is a wonderful setting for a mystery because it's not fully closed, you know, it's not closed off, it's still um permeable, which I think is very much Sayers, but there's still you know a college setting. So there's some people that don't usually belong there, but they're there, you know. So there's a wider wider net of potential um people that might be involved, but then this has been happening for a while, but she's been invited to come help. So there's a a few moving parts that I think make the scene more complicated, but also still contained.
SPEAKER_01The blurry, uh the blurring of fiction and reality, sort of like it's uh it really is a college town.
SPEAKER_03It really is a college town, and Oxford's an interesting place because when I first went there, um I remember going for an a Shakespeare study, summer study program at first as an undergraduate. And I was looking for a uh, like I was looking for a campus, you know, a North American campus, like gates or you know, a physical space. But it's actually called a town down, you know, mentality so that the um the colleges are embedded right in the town of Oxford. So you can walk the streets and really not know you're passing colleges. All you know are you see these huge medieval doors or things. But when you walk through them, it's like walking into Narnia. Then you, you know, you walk into these embedded um magical uh uh gardens or you know, architecture or fields or you know, huge quads or things like that that from the little side streets you would not know winding about them. Um and you always, always have church bells, lots of church bells, um, which reminds me of her Nine Taylor's book. So there's um there's a magical feeling in Oxford, and I think it lends itself, you know, the winding streets and the foggy nights and everything lends itself very much to a Sherlock Holmes feel, right? Or if you really think about even where things are mystery, endeavor, um, always a bit of an ancient mariner feel in the evenings, but there's also these glorious little colleges nestled in, but there's the hustle and bustle of a regular college life. So there's also people who live in the town who are not scholars. And uh, and then there's um the individual lives buzzing within each college within the larger university. So it's a very interesting, lively, um, complicated setting for class questions as well.
SPEAKER_01So I was thinking about this as I was reading, like the way she just um the way she describes Oxford. Um, is it accurate to say that Oxford itself is a character in this novel alongside the humans?
SPEAKER_03Yes, I believe so. I mean, I I really I really do. I mean, even the filmmaker that did the film adaptation of Surprise by Oxford, Ryan Whitaker, has mentioned that. He said, you know, it's hard to set a film in Oxford and not have it be immediately beautiful, but it's also like a character in and of itself. And again, I don't think that's just to simply romanticize it, although there is much romanticism there, but it it does have this history and this mystery to it, and you feel the ghosts of other past, and you feel the intellectual um heaviness and weight and prior thoughts that have been funk, you know, even in the walls themselves. And um, and so I think stepping into that is I think it's a brilliant um setting for uh for a miss a mystery because the city itself is sort of somewhat a labyrinth too, you know, these as I mentioned, little lots of little lanes and things like that, and leaving in, you know, she talks about leaving the college at times to go study at the bodily end, and you know, um people coming in in the corridors and the quads, and and especially at night, it really has that feeling. Um, but it's a character in and of itself. You do the the architecture is so resplendent and it's all over, and um, you just live and breathe it, and um, and the character of it in the pubs and everything else. You really do feel like, in a sense, you're in the presence of of um of someone who's been in the presence of a lot of thought.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but so much of this thought is associated with men's realms, and here we have a women's college. So, what is this like? What does this feel like? And what is it, what did it feel like to you as a woman in a 20 uh, I guess late 20th century studying there?
SPEAKER_03A 21st century kind of yeah, the I was saying how beautiful the architecture in that is too. And then when you compare that with someone like Virginia Wolf in a room of one's own, and talked about the um history of women, in a sense, raising bare walls out of the bare earth was all they could do. You know, women have been um so busy raising families and tending to people's needs and things that studying or whatnot, as she explains in her famous chapter, Shakespeare's sister, what would have happened if Shakespeare had a sister. I think that Virginia Wolf's essay, A Room of One's Own, very much haunts this novel. Um, and it was written just prior. Uh so in this area, in this time frame, uh, um that zeitgeist of thought, where we have the women's college, Shrewsbury's College, and it's markedly much like Virginia Wolf's um college, you know, in a way being modeled on Somerville, which was the only women's college, uh, that it's markedly a poor college. And those things are conveyed in the details, you know, the the dinner that's largely soup, you know, a lot more water than wine. Um, you know, because there's an economic reality to creativity and uh to productivity. And um, and so while Wolf is saying, you know, it's hard to think if one hasn't eaten well, and it's also hard to study and learn and have a place where one. To study and learn if there's not also wealthy alumni that are enabling those sort of endowments. Um, I do think that Sayers is bringing that to the surface too. So she's showing this community of women, um, and in many ways, perhaps how they might have been mocked, you know, everything ever since the blue stockings, you know, in that regard, uh as a closed community of women. And she brings those things to the surface in, you know, what we all deal in in closed communities. I think even, you know, Peter Whimsey talks about that. It's not actually just with women when we're closed off in our own little worlds. But I think it allows her to bring a lot of questions about the relationship between economics and productivity to the surface, as well as um the challenges women have faced in not being represented historically. You know, the whole reason Wolf writes her essay is because she goes to the British Library, you know, with the challenge of writing um a speech about the history of women and you know, intellectually, and there's no books. You know, buyer about women, which becomes really the fodder for her speech, for her talk, and um, and then the basis for the famous essays. So uh I I do think it's very powerful that Sayers decided to do that. When I arrived at Oxford myself, I matriculated at Oriol College. This was in the 90s. Um, they had only been admitting women themselves for just a few years. So even matriculation photo on my wall is only a handful of women. And uh so it is a very um different experience to uh step into a conversation that has been predominantly male and coming in um as a as a woman. And yet I think also um she raises a lot of questions related around gender in this novel, very bravely so, I think.
SPEAKER_01Yes. And I was thinking about like the outcomes for the other alumni, these other women from her class that she's talking to, like um the archaeologist, uh, whom she describes. Oh, she got married, they produced some children whom they probably dumped on the grandparents, very happy grandparents, and like went off to their dicks.
SPEAKER_02So there was sort of like, what do we make of this?
SPEAKER_03What do we, yes, yeah. She she raises the fates of a few different women, you know, and then some that she thinks could have been something else, but she also raises the fact that these are all very viable options. Um, they just lead down very different paths. Uh, and and I think she also explores what happens when, you know, when you do marry, um, making what a weighty decision that can be for a woman. Um, and uh, and I think she's exploring in many ways theologically uh the questions around marriage and around relationship. Um, and her uh, because for her, one of the things I've always loved about Sayers is she's defined um Christian work as being done to the glory of God, you know, that good Christian. It's not that we make separate Christian work per se, you know, quotation marks, that it has to be about Christianity right out or it has to meet these things. It's about doing it well, um, as well as you can to the glory of God. So, you know, she has that great line where she says, you know, we're so busy telling the carpenter to make sure he doesn't drink after his hours and his labor, and you know, and he's um virtuous in his home and in his habits and that he goes to church every Sunday. But we also we actually should be telling him that he needs to make a good table. Yes, you know, because that also represents God to others as well as um the work of our hands. So I think her love of work, which I think was a great influence on someone like Madeline Langle, her love of good work for the sake of good work itself, because we are working for the Lord, not as we would work for men, um, is uh is a crucial theme she's also examining. Um, but you know, alongside behind all of this, we have a murder mystery that also has a romance story. Yeah. And that's fascinating. We don't always see that. Uh so she's doing a lot of um weaving.
SPEAKER_01Yes. And it's so difficult not to see some autobiographical element in Harriet Vane.
SPEAKER_03Right. Absolutely, absolutely. Um, in in terms of I think what she was trying to um, you know, come to terms with with her own creativity and uh and also um I think the complications of being um a thinking woman in relationship and um and also then later with her own marriage, but also many of her own pressures and and problems to try to survive um in various circumstances. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Well, let's expand a little bit on um a couple of those themes because um that would allow us to not spoil the ending for people, but also get into like the depth of ideas. So um how does um because we see a lot of reflection from Harriet Vane about her work and kind of struggling with her career options, like what she did with her life after college.
SPEAKER_03Well, I think there's always the tension, right, on how to survive when you're writing and when you're doing highly academic work and how do you pay the bills, right? That's always the tension. And um, so I think in some ways her detective novels, because they they did well and they were probably where she is most well known, um, probably even still like they're enduring, I would say, in the way that she that allowed her the popular audience. Uh, you know, those don't do allow her to pay the bills. But I do think what interestingly did help to put her on the map was um, you know, the man born to be king. Uh and because uh that was, you know, um the BBC's radio production request for her to do a radio play of the life of Christ. So that's no small invitation. Um, around the time, similarly to something like, you know, the BBC lectures done by Lewis, uh, you know, the short talks that would become the basis for new Christianity. We have a world-weary audience, you know, an audience that does not believe that the Lord hears our prayers or that, you know, we can be loved or seen. And I think similarly to Lewis, she is able to convey through her work that, uh, like Augustine says, you know, God loves us as though there's only one of us. And so the more the man born to be king, I think was a real turning point for her. I mean, she had done some prior work to that too and was known and respected, but she really put her neck on the line with that and with the producer, and she really made some very bold, creative decisions that at first caused much ire and much criticism. You know, so she decided to set that story um really as um an everyday type of story. Uh so instead of using the elevated or standardized Queen's English, um, you know, and uh and having them speak, uh church speak, as she said, you know, Jesus doesn't speak Bible. So, you know, she made the scenes where, you know, he's chatting with his neighbors and his family and friends at the baptism with John. You know, he's he's got disciples that um speak Cockme, you know, and um and other um other class diction, and and that caused an outrage. Uh the choice of language. What I think language is always the seed of revolution, and language is always the seed of power and control, um, really, ever since Genesis 3 shows us that, but the edemic naming, but I think within whoever has control of language, and she um she stood her ground and argued based on creative um liberty and and truthfulness, uh, that she really felt that this is how the story needed to be done, that God moved among the masses, and um, and Jesus was a real person in a lower to middle class environment, you know. So, how do we represent that and um and other characters as well? And eventually I think it won great acclaim. Uh, but she had, you know, um threats, and uh the producer was told to fire her, and you know, she it was a really controversial work. So in how she um engendered it and that, and yet it's one that um every year Lewis listened to. It was one of the texts that he made a ritual listening to every year. He so appreciated it. So I think her relationship to to uh really believing that work should reflect the glory of God and that we should we really need to follow that calling, that it's good work. Um, she, you know, she walked that talk, which is what she said Jesus did too. You know, he was not somebody um that didn't walk their talk.
SPEAKER_01I love that. And that's a theme that I see so much in Gaudy Night, like in her conversation about the different women's um varied faiths after graduation, like so many of her classmates where it's like um she's very much thinking about that. Is their work glorifying God? She never says it in quite those terms, but you can see this question at the back of her mind.
SPEAKER_03I think you're absolutely right because she fans out a few examples, and I think it's actually quite it's a really fascinating book to read because it allows you to see the options without it being a heavy-handed treatise. I don't think she's coming across um, I mean, feminist has become such a loaded word now, we can't even really use that in a sense, but but she's I she's not because there's critiques of everyone here, right? There's there's critiques of the um scholars and you know, and as we even see how without giving the ending away, right? But there's a combination of um of pride and power dynamics and lack of insight that weaves through all classes and and all types of people and and um people who have committed to making a learning, um, they're living out of a learning, and that can actually make them myopic, and via and vice versa, you know, people who are in serving roles who are um you know similarly um complicated. So I I think she does a great job of actually making us really through the detective and mystery novel form, ultimately examining ourselves, right? Which is I think what the form does is it uh there's something to solve, but it makes us look at like tragedy does, you know. She makes us look at what are we doing, uh holds the mirror up to us in some degree, what what needs to be solved within ourselves. And so I think, you know, she's not coming across as this fate is better than this fate. I think she's more come, I I've had the more of the sense of exploring the notion of um really the the the only true regret is not doing something to the glory of God. And she's careful, I think, in these novels not to spell out the theology, um, if anything, to actually dapple in it a little, but to allow these, I think, to be a little more, oh, I wouldn't even say entertainment-based, because she does explore some really, really complex themes. I mean, there's eroticism, you know, she dreams of Peter Whimsy, you know, she admits being like there's an attraction, but there's also a fear. I think she really explores a lot of things in which uh we all do, but I think especially women, right? Facing those choices of uh, if I if I were to fall in love, would I give up all of this? Um, if I were to have children, would I not be allowed to think? You know, um, if I pursued a very intellectual life, would that be at the cost of this? So she's asking those questions, they're still very relevant to us today.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And in some ways, this novel is really unusual in the sense that it focuses on these questions more perhaps than the mystery. It's kind of um, again, not to give away the ending, but this is the one mystery in the Peter Whimsey series where you don't actually know what the mystery is until pretty much the end.
SPEAKER_03It's a it's a it's a quite an unusual one, right? Yeah, it is we don't want to usually we start with a body.
SPEAKER_01It's like here's the body in the bathtub. Let's find out who'd done it.
SPEAKER_03Not here. Right. You have this on Hattie's corpus, you have this issue, but no, you don't, you have a very different one. And um, and you have, I I do think it's it's a really interesting ploy she uses of of bringing Harriet back uh into this community so that she's not only studying um, and this happens of course in the detective novel, it's a study of people, right? It's it's not just a um a puzzle piecing together, it's a studying of not only who done it, but why done it. Yes. Why and why uh why do we why do we do these things? Um is the greater question. And I think I think this one, because it's such an interesting one, it focuses so much more on letters and um and language and the control of that, um the effects and consequences of even what might seem to be small decisions, all against the backdrop of relationship, right, which culminates in hers and Peter's, that's always in the background here. And and I think what's interesting with Peter Whimsey too is he's not just um you know a one-dimensional flat love interest either. Um, and because she brings a checkered past, uh, I mean, we all have a checkered past. Um, I don't trust anybody who puts an adjective in front of sin. But what given her own background, I think it gave her the ability to actually really explore things like judgment and shame and guilt. Um, and uh, and how do we actually navigate this world in which there are very real painful, difficult things or things that we have done that um society is quick to put us in a box for. Um, and what is it that Jesus has done? And again, this is what she says, and you know, creator chaos in that is that we have to be reminded again of what Jesus did on the cross, what he what he achieved for us, um, and how incredibly powerful and extensive that is. We can't water that down. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So because of your own Oxford story where you came to Christ, and again, uh, if you're listening and you haven't read Surprise by Oxford, you need to do that. But can I ask you, like, let's say you go to a Gaudi, say next summer. So how do you imagine? It would be well, so what kind of conversations do you imagine having with your classmates?
SPEAKER_03Oh gosh, that would be so fun. I I have not been at a Gaudi, believe it or not. Um, whenever I've been, I I have not timed it with that. Uh and I think there was a time I was invited, but I was pregnant with my twins or something. Um but you know, some of us do stay in touch here and there. I there is, I mean, I think like all reunions, you know, there is great, there's great fun. Uh, I think there's also uh I think reunions are a time for revision, right? For um, okay, not only, you know, not only how am I looking, how am I doing, how am I, but there's this, you know, I think stopping at a point in your life and looking at, okay, where have I, where am I at? I think they're they're interesting because they are about celebration and they are about memory and about community, um, and sort of a kinship, a fellowship that you'll always have. Uh, you know, once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia, you feel that way a bit about your college, you know, and we can say that about any colleges, but I I remember once an Oxford on saying to me, you know, Oxford calls its own. And I was thinking, oh, what a mythological thing to say. But I understand, like, there's this, there is something very everyone who's there, and this is again not to over-romanticize, but really loves learning. And um, there is a, and I I do think that Sayers conveys this well. There's a gentlemanliness and a gentlewomanliness about academia. And that is not a class statement, that's a spirit statement, a sense in which, you know, um, I think that explains subtle mortification with plagiarism or academic dishonesty, but also the sense that you are, you know, you are open to debate, you're open to civility, you are going to discuss in the Aristotelian sense, right? That you can entertain many different ideas without necessarily accepting any of them. And you can do that with um with respect, and you can do that with wit. Uh, I think wit is something that's very much missing in our North American society. Um, and I really grew to love wit, not just because it's funny, but because it's insightful. And um, you know, and true wit is not actually lifts somebody up, not down. Um, so it's not a mocking or a parody, you know, fully. I mean, there can be wit elements in that. But I think that's where Peter Whimsey is so delightful, because a lot of his discourse is is peppered, sprinkled with these witty aphorisms or references to things that open up into other things, but it's not about being elitist. He's a Lord Whimsy, but it's not about just elitism. It's actually about a great love for ideas. Um, and people will sometimes say to me when they read Surprise by Oxford, oh, did you really, you know, did you really think about literature like that? You have these epigraphs. You have an and Sayers loves epigraphs, you know, she has Italian and and Latin epigraphs, but it's it's not because you're you're you're stilted or trying to show off or, you know, um, or trying to be inaccessible. It's because you actually have such a joy uh for what you're studying in this language. And one of the things I loved about um reunions or even just even just high table in that is everyone had a respect and a joy for what other people are studying and what other people are looking into, um, and how you there was a genuine interest in those ideas and a genuine curiosity for people. And so I think at the heart of the detective novel, the murder mystery novel is curiosity, and uh which can be a double-edged sword, you know, but it can also be a wonderful thing, an important, beautiful thing to have about people. We are laid much much far open, wider open, as Francis Bacon said, by a question than we are by anything else. And so it is the genre that allows us to ask questions of people.
SPEAKER_01I love that. Well, what would you say in particular to Christians as they're thinking? Like, how do I read murder mysteries as a Christian?
SPEAKER_03Oh, that's such a great question. And I've actually been thinking about exactly that. I'm doing on a uh brainstorming actually on a work um about faith and literature right now with a really beloved editor, and we've been just discussing that exact topic. Well, Sayers uh she wrote a really interesting um essay on illiterate reading, like the or the notion of the a chapter on illiterate reading, how we've become illiterate readers. And she's writing this in the 30s or 40s, which obviously is just even more so relevant to us now. When you made the opening comment about the concerns with AI, you know, yes, I think we I agree with Marilyn Robinson, right, who just said, I think very aptly that we're on in the virgin away of a new romanticism. You know, this is the equivalent of our industrial revolution. Um we are uh there are very wonderful, important things about progress in technology, and there are also things that are significantly dehumanizing. And we know that people are reading less and less in the sense of whole stories. Uh, they're reading more excerpts and things like that in public schools, but they're reading more and more in terms of what we're scrolling through. We're just getting a lot of information and no wisdom. And, you know, back at the time, she calls this illiterate reading that people read the question, but they're not even answering the question correctly. Um, so you know, you're you're and she talks about, you know, students, grading adult students, and I understand that. Years of studying, you know, teaching college. You you always say the students just read the question correctly first, you know. So listen. You're what you're doing is the act of listening and listen to the question. So I think, I think as Christians, we're people of the book, we're the original bibliophiles. So we're already humanetical readers. Uh, and we know that there's more going on beneath the surface. And oh my goodness, Sayers is entirely alert to that as a Dantean, right? She's immersed in Dante and in medieval um allegory and reading and um and spiritual allegory. So there's many, much, much more that means the eye. You know, the medieval thinkers were comfortable with the unseen. Um, we are not so comfortable um with the unseen. We want the scene. And I think uh murder mysteries, detective novels, things like that allow us to look beneath the surface.
unknownRight?
SPEAKER_03They encourage us to actually detect what is unseen. It's interesting that she calls it Gaudi Night, not Gaudi Day. You know, Gaudi Day is not too Byronic. That's true. I hadn't thought about that. Oh she walks in darkness, like the name of Club was called in the star skies, and he, you know, calls it Gaudi Day, but um having a Gauddy Day denies. Um there's a pun, right, on Gaudi. Yeah. And uh and all Good writers have puns in their titles.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I love that.
SPEAKER_03So it's important that it's night.
SPEAKER_01Well, I have a final question for you as we conclude. So, what classic book do you wish you had written? And why?
unknownOh my God.
SPEAKER_03Oh my goodness. There are so many. I I struggle a little bit somewhere between Keats, you know, had anxiety of influence, he says after reading Milton and Never Wants to Write Anything Again, to envying everything I have read that is good, um, coveting each one. And you know, I I think the sign of a you know a good read is that you don't want it to end, as you were saying, a classic, right? Yeah. Always speaks to us. We don't want it to end. And when we finished it, we wish we had written it. I think those are the three testifiers to an enduring classic. Um, oh, there's so many. And I would obviously I would say off the top of my head, of course, like anything, Shakespeare or Milton or or any of those, but probably one of the most enduring novels for me is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. And I I think uh I I know that people can have love-hate relationships with the Bronte's, maybe less so with Jane Eyre than Wuthering Heights, but with Jane Eyre, I I do love that it is really one of the first female buildings romance we have. Um, I do love that it's fiction, but identifies itself as an autobiography. So I think genre-wise, um, like Sayers was doing, you know, there's a lot of um experimentation and a lot of cutting of new ground for a woman writer. I also think it's a very nuanced novel in terms of choices, especially choices with marriage and relationships, and the consequences of that and and the necessity really thinking how that might play out. I think threaded all underneath by what is it to have our own real relationship with God, a personal one, not church with a capital C, but church with a small c. That we can be drawn to lots of different ways, that the gospel might be shared or embodied or you know, shared. Um, but how are we really embodying it? Um, how are we really broken and and how are we really being redeemed? And uh and the fact that I think particularly we can be accused of being liars when we're most honest, and uh, and that women have been especially silenced in that regard. Um, and so I think it's a very astute novel for looking at uh um the the journey and choices of of the soul in in our society, which would make sense at the time frame it's written in the mid-19th century, uh of trying to find your own way as opposed to um the institutionalized or industrial or whatever. But also uh I think a really interesting um particularly nuanced read for women and and for men too. I think the character of Rochester is very, very fascinating as well. But I think in terms of navigating and and discerning your own personal truth before God, it's a very important novel.
SPEAKER_01Well, that actually sounds a lot like what Sayers is also trying to do.
SPEAKER_03I think so too. I do too, absolutely. And then by by producing good work.
SPEAKER_01By producing good work. Well, thank you so much. I'm very grateful for the good work you are producing, and I'm looking forward to this new project.
SPEAKER_03Thank you. You're very gracious. I love literature and I love talking with friends like you in it. And it's just a delight to connect here in the love of God and in the love of literature. The two go together.
SPEAKER_02Well, thank you so much, Carolyn. Thank you so much, Nadia. Have a lovely day. I appreciate this conversation.