Abandoned by user

This book is only nominally a mystery. What it really is is Dorothy Sayers's manifesto, which holds that educating women is valuable, that women can be scholars, that work is work whether it is done by men or women, that intellectual work is valuable in it's own right, and that women should have agency to do the work that they feel they are best suited to do, whether that work involves marriage or children or not.

The mystery is engaging, but it's Oxford, and intellect and the sisterhood of academia (sometimes backbiting and nasty, like all sisterhoods can be) that makes a home for an odd set of women who have turned their backs on the traditional sphere of womanhood that is the heart and soul of this book.

Anyway, I loved this book. I love Harriet Vane. Peter Wimsey is fine, but it's Harriet that I love. And Miss Lydgate, who knows everything and, as Peter said:

“Miss Lydgate is a very great and a very rare person."

I will read this one again. And again.