![]() Viewing Sayers's detective novels, particularly the ones featuring Harriet Vane, through the lens of Sayers's own definition of feminism and the tradition of New Woman novels of the time, reveals a more historically accurate perspective on her work than recent interpretations of Sayers that draw on contemporary feminism. Although she did not claim the label feminist, Sayers, a second-generation New Woman, portrayed the dilemmas of both her generation of emancipated women and the preceding generation of New Women in her later novels. She did so by incorporating into her fiction her interest in the debate over the changing place of women in society, also the theme of two of her essays. Although this had been her intention from her first detective novel, Whose Body? (1923), Sayers felt she did not achieve it until Gaudy Night. In an essay titled "Gaudy Night" (1937) after her novel of the same name (1935), Sayers states that her goal in writing detective fiction was to bring it back in line with the mainstream of English literature she wished to produce a text "less like a conventional detective story and more like a novel" (208). Her period of writing detective fiction (1923-37) was a brief phase in her overall career, and her objective in writing in this genre was specific. Sayers (1893-1957) published widely on a diverse range of topics. ![]() ![]() A scholar, theologian, medievalist, playwright, and novelist, Dorothy L.
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