Like God on the Seventh Day”
The Theological Aesthetics of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12445644 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Chene Heady (0009-0008-9144-1771, Longwood University Farmville VA USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 29 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 350-369 |
| Publication date | 2025-06-23 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Religion and the Arts (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1079-9265 • E-ISSN: 1568-5292 |
| Publisher | Brill (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1163/15685292-02903002 |
| OpenAlex | W4411705005 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1936)—an amateur detective novel centered around mystery writer Harriet Vane’s attempts to solve crimes committed at an Oxford women’s college—has been hailed as both the first academic and the first feminist mystery novel. While much Gaudy Night scholarship analyzes Harriet Vane’s paradigmatic struggle to determine whether (and how) women in a patriarchal society can possess both meaningful careers and meaningful romantic relationships, the work’s treatment of Harriet’s specific vocation as a literary artist remains strangely underexplored. This article contends that Harriet Vane’s simultaneous development as both a person and artist reflects Sayers’s creative appropriation of the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain’s theological aesthetics and can best be understood in this context. Influenced by Maritain, Dorothy L. Sayers as both an artist and an intellectual constructs a model of literary creation that not merely deconstructs but erases the divide between sacred and secular
Art · Visual arts · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |