‘Much Learning Hath Made Thee Mad’: Academic Communities, Women’s Education and Crime in Golden Age Detective Fiction

Abstract

In the history of education women and their communities have always posed a threat to the male stronghold. Turning on the idea that women have historically been perceived as interlopers, and thus symbolically criminalised by their desire for, and ultimately successful, admittance to scholarly and educational spaces, this article examines a cluster of Golden Age detective novels from the 1930s and 1940s (published at a time when it was still possible for women to study for but not receive a degree) in which educated women and criminality come into violent contact. Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935), Mavis Doriel Hay’s Death on the Cherwell (1935), Gladys Mitchell’s Laurels are Poison (1942), and Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes (1946) are all set in women’s residential academic communities and place the question of women’s right to learning at the crux of their narratives. By invoking the concomitant history of women’s education, this article examines the way in which these authors use the genre to perform contemporary concerns about educated women and more specifically the fear that women are made monstrous, deviant, or corrupt by their contact with Higher Education. In the process they reveal the vulnerability of women’s institutions in the 1930s and 1940s and acknowledge the competing and incompatible demands of educated women’s personal and professional lives. Much of this is communicated through a preoccupation with territory and the act of trespass: the communities, and the women in them, are perceived as dangerous and threatening and yet are themselves consistently under attack. By staging the educated woman as a criminal, or at least a suspected criminal, these texts make manifest her symbolic position in early twentieth century society: she is a woman made transgressive by her crossing of figurative and literal boundaries.

Keywords:

• women’s education
• female communities
• women teachers
• golden age detective fiction
• academic crime fiction
• the university novel
• Dorothy Sayers
• Gladys Mitchell
• Josephine Tey
• Mavis Doriel Hay

ORCID

Elizabeth English http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1939-9421

Notes

1 Jane Marcus explores Cambridge’s somewhat mixed reception of Woolf’s talk and text (Marcus 1996).

2 Woolf refers here to college rules determining who may walk on the lawn.

3 Woolf herself had an interesting relationship with education. She was an autodidact or what Hermione Lee calls ‘self-educated’ and as a teenager read voraciously from her father, Leslie Stephen’s library (Lee 1997: 143). From 1897, she attended classes in Greek, Latin, and the Classics (most notably with Cambridge classicist Janet Case), though she took no examinations in these subjects (Lee 1997: 143). It is often noted that unlike her brother, Thoby and other men in her family, Woolf did not go on to study at university in a formal way, but Christine Kenyon Jones and Anna Snaith’s article on Woolf’s relationship with education makes the case that ‘Woolf had much more first-hand experience of women’s higher education than either she or her biographers have acknowledged’ (Kenyon Jones and Snaith 2010: 1). Woolf tackles the subject of women’s education on numerous other occasions. See, for instance, ‘A Society’ (1989 [1921]), ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’ (1989 [1926]), and Three Guineas (1993 [1938]).

4 Dyhouse discusses these financial motivations (Dyhouse 1995: 8).

5 Dyhouse notes that in 1930 the proportion of women in Scottish and Welsh universities was higher than that in English universities. She also discusses this ‘stagnation’ of numbers (Dyhouse 2006: 82–3).

6 The 1870 Education Act stated that children between the ages of 5 and 13 should receive an education. For a historical account of the many factors behind the success of the teacher training college, see Edwards 2001.

7 For figures regarding the percentage of financial support awarded to women, see Dyhouse 1997: 209–10.

8 Dyhouse points out that ‘grants for teacher training were a very significant source of funding for women attending university before the Second World War’ (Dyhouse 1997: 217). But, notably, even these grants were more generous for male students than female (Dyhouse 1997: 209). On the nature of these agreements or ‘pledges’ see Dyhouse 1997: 217–18.

9 Dyhouse’s study of 800 women who graduated before 1939 provides fascinating insight into how women students felt about their ‘pledge’ to teach and the way in which it shaped, and often limited, their scholarly and professional choices and ambitions (Dyhouse 1997).

10 In 1937–8, 38 per cent of women lived in halls of residence compared to 21 per cent of men. 19 per cent of women lived in lodgings compared to 37.5 per cent of men. The numbers of men and women living at home were more even: 42.6 per cent of women compared to 41 per cent of men (Dyhouse 1995: 93).

11 The beginning of what Dyhouse calls the ‘[e]rosion of the separatist tradition’ at Oxford and Cambridge began with the move towards co-education in the 1960s (Dyhouse 2006: 163). Outside of Oxbridge, coeducational universities already existed but as Dyhouse points out, Oxford and Cambridge were ‘profoundly structured by sexual difference’ (Dyhouse 2006: 161). Other female colleges—Bedford, Royal Holloway, Westfield, and Kings College of Household and Social Sciences—also transitioned to coeducational establishments around this time (Dyhouse 2006: 129). The teacher training college underwent a similar change with the admittance of men in the early 1960s and the wholesale shift of training to university Institutes of Education later in the same decade (Edwards 2001: 4 and 14).

12 The ‘Golden Age’, according to Rosalind Coward and Linda Semple refers to work published between Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920 and Dorothy L. Sayers’s final novel, Busman’s Honeymoon, in 1937 (Coward and Semple 1989: 39). Victoria Stewart states that the term ‘Golden Age’ originates with John Strachey’s 1939 article ‘The Golden Age in Detective Fiction’ (Stewart 2017: 7). Stephen Knight argues for evidence that the Golden Age continued after 1940 (Knight 2003: 77).

13 We might look to The Detection Club (which Sayers co-founded) and ‘The Detection Club Oath’, which members were required to take, as an example of this (1946). S. S. Van Dine’s ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’ (1946 [1928]) and Ronald Knox’s ‘A Detective Story Decalogue’ (1961 [1929]) are similar instances of detective fiction writers setting out the principles of the genre. Of course, these rules and conventions were both adhered to and flouted in equal measure.

14 Sayers is among a number of women writers at this time referred to as the ‘Queens’ of the Golden Age. For an etymology of the term ‘Queens of Crime’ see Stewart 2017: 4.

15 Megan Hoffman offers an interesting discussion of how these pranks ‘employ gender play’ (Hoffman 2016: 134).

16 On Tey, see Roy 1980: 13. On Mitchell, see Kungl 2006: 105.

17 Kungl 2006: 105.

18 On this trend of the Oxford Novel and what Anna Bogen calls the ‘boom in middlebrow university fiction’ (Bogen 2016: 262) see Bogen 2016 and Inness 1995 (on American college fiction). Bogen comments on the drive for authenticity in university fiction (Bogen 2006: 15 and 20) and notes the problem this posed for women authors writing about institutions already under scrutiny. As Bogen states, ‘[f]or women writers trying to expose to a greedy public the details of “what each term was like”, this documentary aspect was apt to become conflated with a sense of sexual notoriety’ (Bogen 2016: 263). On university fiction more widely, see Bogen 2014.

19 Adam Broome’s The Oxford Murders (1929), Cecil Masterman’s An Oxford Tragedy (1933), G.D.H. and Margaret Cole’s Off with her Head (1938), and Gladys Mitchell’s Spotted Hemlock (1958) are all set in higher education establishments (although Mitchell’s is concerned with a women’s agricultural college). James Hilton’s Murder at School (1931), R. C. Woodthorpe’s The Public School Murder (1932), Gladys Mitchell’s Death at the Opera (1934), St Peter’s Finger (1938), Tom Brown’s Body (1949), Josephine Bell’s Death at Half-Term (1939), Edmund Crispin’s Love Lies Bleeding (1948), Nancy Spain’s Poison for Teacher (1949), and Agatha Christie’s Cat Among the Pigeons (1959) are all set in school environments. These few novels alone convey the popularity of academic crime narrative. A number of critics have commented on the prevalence of academic crime fiction: see, for instance, Hoffman 2016, Leonardi 1995, and Marchino 1989.

20 There is significant scholarship on Sayers’s work and Gaudy Night in particular (Auerbach 1975, Bogen 2016, Heilbrun 1968, Kenney 1991, McClellan 2004, McFadden 2006, and Taylor 2002, to name but a few), but much less on Mitchell (see, for instance, Hoffman 2016, Kungl 2006, O’Brien 2017, Peppis 2017, and Turner 2013) and Tey (see, for instance, Hoffman 2016, Martin 2001, and Turner 2013) and nothing to my knowledge on Hay. This disparity could be attributed to assumptions around literary value and the perception of Gaudy Night as more experimental than Sayers’s previous novels (and, one could add, other detective fiction) and therefore worthy of serious scholarly attention. Sayers herself said that she aimed to write something ‘less like a conventional detective story and more like a novel’ (quoted in Heilbrun 1968: 328). My article positions Sayers alongside her peers to intentionally distribute this attention. My choice of two texts set in women’s teacher training colleges is also deliberate. As Dyhouse points out, in the 1920s and 1930s less than 1 in 10 female university students attended Oxford or Cambridge, meaning that our scholarly interest in the Oxford Novel/academic crime set at Oxbridge is also somewhat disproportionate (Dyhouse 1997: 211). This article therefore attempts to acknowledge the wider range of women’s educational destinations.

21 Hoffman similarly argues that ‘the formula of transgression and resolution “allows a safe” textual space for the exploration of anxieties surrounding constructions of femininity in the period’ (Hoffman 2016: 1).

22 Interestingly, Bogen points out that the college wall is ‘a stock feature of university fiction’ (Bogen 2016: 266).

23 Dyhouse notes that this culture of segregation was still in place in the 1960s. In 1966 a questionnaire designed by the men’s union at the University of Edinburgh showed that 85 per cent of 800 male students were against admitting women to the union (Dyhouse 1995: 191).

24 Both Helen Taylor and Marya McFadden also note the significance of the name Shrewsbury and the gendered connotations of ‘shrew’ (McFadden 2000: 262 and Taylor 2002: 151).

25 Hay’s choice of names is purposeful. Ezekiel references the Hebrew prophet who was amongst those exiled from Israel and who prophesied their return. His surname, with its similarity to the word ‘land’, is no doubt also intentional, as is his father’s name, Adam. Lidgett is a name that originates from the word Lidgate, meaning a gateway (Wareing 1901: 482). Again, these names raise questions over the right to territory as well as the importance of boundaries.

26 Dyhouse explains that in 1897 male ‘students had lowered an effigy of a woman wearing ample breeches and ludicrously stuffed and padded out with straw and riding a bicycle, from a window outside the Senate House’ and in 1921 ‘a mob of [male] undergraduates descended on Newnham with catcalls and chants of: “We won’t have women”. They barged the bronze memorial gates of the college with a handcart, causing serious damage to the lower panels’ (Dyhouse 1995: 239).

27 Of course, we might also consider the class dynamic at work here. Annie is a working-class woman serving middle-class women and is thus on the periphery of this female community.

28 We are also told that Miss Paynter-Tree once masqueraded as a male garage hand (Mitchell 1961 [1942]: 164).

29 In her study of turn of the century American women’s college fiction, Inness also explores the fear that team sports could make women more masculine (Inness 1995: chapter 3). On the British context, Richard Smart comments on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century fear that physical exercise could damage women’s reproductive capabilities and incline them towards members of their own sex (Smart 2001: 133–5).

30 However, Turner notes that by the mid-1930s ‘accepted medical opinion [was] that there was little evidence to support the claim that strenuous physical activity was detrimental to the physical or mental well-being of girls and woman’ (Turner 2013: 87).

31 Hoffman also investigates the way in which lesbian desire is introduced and then neutralized in Tey’s and Mitchell’s novels (Hoffman 2016).

32 McFadden argues that ‘Sayers uses violence in Gaudy Night as a pretence for exploring the homoerotic desires and fears that surface at a women’s college when an anonymous aggressor is presumed to be a woman driven mad with sexual repression’ (McFadden 2000: 356).

33 Inness’ study Intimate Communities features a chapter on ‘Mashes, Smashes, Crushes, and Raves’ in American women’s college fiction (Inness 1995).

34 Turner views this admiration as a kind of reverence for girls’ athletic bodies (Turner 2013: 86).

35 Faderman discusses the use of the phrase ‘twilight lovers’ (Faderman 2012: 298). Edwards points out that such all-female dances were a usual occurrence and that they ‘evolved curious rituals which echoed the courtship customs of the middle-class home’ (Edwards 2001: 44).

36 McClellan offers a similar argument in relation to Gaudy Night when she states that the novel ‘makes conscious all of the kinds of gender stereotyping women experience—both as mothers and intellectuals—in order to challenge them’ (McClellan 2004: 332). Other critics have acknowledged the ideological ambivalence of women’s Golden Age detective fiction. See, for instance, Hoffman 2016 and Schaub 2013.

37 Philip convinces Harriet to live with him out of wedlock only to renege on that arrangement and propose.

38 Interestingly, Smart comments on the difference between the ethos of the teaching college (specifically the physical education college) and that of the women’s university. While the teaching college replicated a familial dynamic, the women’s university followed the ‘collegiate model’ of the male university (Smart 2001: 141).

39 Alison Oram discusses the connection between teaching as a vocation and maternalism in her study of women teachers in the early twentieth century (Oram 1996: 17). For an examination of maternity in Sayers’s novel see McClellan 2004.

40 The importance of food and diet is apparent in each of these novels. Gaudy Night comments on the poor quality of the food served at Shrewsbury (Sayers 2006 [1935]: 24); the students of Leys are forced to supplement their disappointing meals with cakes and biscuits and seem to be ever-hungry (Tey 1998 [1946]); while Mrs Bradley is said to feed the students well during her time as warden, at her own financial cost (Mitchell 1961 [1942]: 214–15). In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf famously complains about the quality of the food served at the women’s colleges, not least the ‘[p]runes and custard’ (Woolf 1993 [1929]: 16). Rather than snobbery, this is Woolf again decrying the second-rate resources allocated to women’s colleges in comparison to men’s because ‘[o]ne cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well’ (Woolf 1993 [1929]: 16).

41 Harriet worries that ‘if I once gave way to Peter, I should go up like straw’ (Sayers 2006 [1935]: 490). McClellan points out that Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), which shows us Harriet and Peter’s married life, neglects ‘Harriet’s career, her writing, or anything else remotely professional other than her duties as Lord Peter’s wife and the mother of his child’ (McClellan 2004: 339). We might then wonder whether despite her hopes and intentions, Harriet is engulfed by her marriage.

42 Elsewhere, Dyhouse mentions that concern over married women’s wasted degrees surfaces in the 1930s as well (Dyhouse 1995: 242).

43 Hoffman’s chapter on women’s education and work in Golden Age crime fiction also explores this tension between traditional expectations and new opportunities for women. Specifically, Hoffman states that ‘many plots introduce a successful woman only to have her “natural” inclinations towards marriage and motherhood move her to abandon her career at the novel’s conclusion’ (Hoffman 2016: 13).

44 On women’s perceived predisposition to teaching see Vicinus 1985: 24.

45 After her Cambridge lecture, Woolf reflected in her diary that the students were ‘[d]estined to become schoolmistresses in shoals’ (Woolf 1980: 200). Dyhouse’s article ‘Signing the Pledge?’ demonstrates the way in which women’s professional choices were severely limited by the educational funding available to them (Dyhouse 1997).

46 ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’ (1989 [1926]) was published as a short story in November 1926 in Atlanta’s Garland: Being the Book of the Edinburgh University Women’s Union but was originally intended as part of Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room (1922).

47 On the educated woman in literature, see for instance, Susan J. Leonardi (1989).