In Gaudy Night, the semi-autobiographical heroine Harriet Vane also resides in Mecklenburgh Square, and readers catch on to the significance of this choice of accommodation.
A biography by Francesca Wade, Square Haunting (2020), celebrates her audacity ( Wade discusses Gaudy Night here on the National Review podcast.) Sayers rented a flat in Mecklenburgh Square, where other notable writers like Hilda Doolittle and Virginia Woolf once made their homes. A struggling, independent female in 1920s London when women were not encouraged to work, Sayers was pushing against the current in all sorts of ways. She began publishing mysteries for the money.
Sayers rises above the average mystery author in both style and profundity.ĭorothy Sayers was a successful mystery novelist when she published Gaudy Night (1935), yet this novel is revered as the most literary of her fiction titles.
