Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night (1935) is the crown jewel of the Wimsey series and one of the first novels to treat a woman's intellectual life as worthy of serious fiction. When mystery writer Harriet Vane attends a reunion at her Oxford college, she discovers that someone is waging a vicious campaign of destruction against the dons. As she investigates, she must also confront her unresolved feelings for Lord Peter Wimsey. The novel is a passionate defence of women's education and the life of the mind.