‘It’s a Good Thing to Take an Interest’: Care and University Women in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night and Barbara Pym’s No Fond Return of Love

Abstract

This essay explores discourses of emotional labour in the university novel. It focuses on Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935) and Barbara Pym’s No Fond Return of Love (1961), two novels written at transformational moments when women’s participation in higher education was increasing and the emergence of the welfare state was transforming ideas about the social function of the university. The essay pays particular attention to the various, shifting uses of the word ‘interest’, a phatic expression that connotes both affect and intellect, in depictions of emotional labour. While care has long been understood as a vital part of learning, thinking, and education, Sayers and Pym depict women academics who are ambivalent about performing emotional labour. These novels prefigure ongoing debates about whether universities, and the public sphere more broadly, can be transformed by a feminine ethics which values emotion and relationship building or whether such an ethics of care may enable the exploitation of caregivers and perpetuate a history of female exploitation. As this essay considers how academic work has transformed in the wake of what Arlie Russell Hochschild terms the growth of the ‘care sector’, it explores the forms and affordances of academic emotional labour as well as the spaces, both institutional and symbolic, in which such labour is undertaken.

Keywords:

• care
• intellectual labour
• education
• academic novel
• emotional labour
• interest

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, for example, Randall R. Curren’s discussion of Aristotle’s argument in Politics ‘that schools and other public institutions should promote mutual goodwill, trust, and friendship’ (Curren 2000: 215).

2 See, for example, Fan Y et. al who find gender and racial bias in student evaluations (2019), and Esarey and Valdes who explore the ‘unacceptably high error rate’ of course evaluations (2020: 1106).

3 For further discussion see Dasgupta, Peat, and Vogelaar, ‘Care in the Time of Covid-19: Accounting for Academic Care Labor’ forthcoming in The Journal of Economic Issues. My initial thinking about care labour in academia emerged through my many conversations with Alison Vogelaar and Poulomi Dasgupta, and I am indebted to them for their many insights as well as to Emily Ridge, the co-editor of this special issue.

4 Throughout the essay, I use the term ‘academic novel’ or ‘university novel’ rather than the narrower, because of its site-specific designation, ‘campus novel.’ The university novel, according to Anna Bogen, is a term ‘widely used and seldom defined’ (2014: 9). She dates the genre back to the middle ages but suggests it is primarily a nineteenth- and twentieth century phenomenon with most early examples set at Oxford and almost all depicting male characters. Bogen’s focus is on women’s university novels which she dates to the 1930s, and sees, like the male examples, as bildungsroman (11).

5 For further details, see Dyehouse.

6 History from the college website: https://www.roehampton.ac.uk/colleges/whitelands-college/history/

7 Elizabeth English notes that, according to the 1944 McNair report, women accounted for 70% of the teaching profession, most in primary schools.

8 As English and Bogen both remark, the Oxford novel is disproportionate in influence because less than one in ten female university students attended Oxford and Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s, in part because of quotas. Moreover, these students remained more segregated because of the college system.