Sayers' tenth Peter Wimsey detective novel, Gaudy Night (1935) might be read as a sustained examination of questions pertinent to those engaged by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas (1938). And yet I would like to suggest a focus that brings them closer together and contributes to a more accurate picture of the 1930s literature and culture: I propose that Dorothy L. Woolf's acknowledged position in Modernism and Sayers' in 'golden age' detective fiction would seem to offer little opportunity for placing them in dialogue.
Sayers, and they do so in ways that keep them far apart. Widely-accepted versions of 1930s literary history that emphasize documentary and leftist politics make outliers of both Virginia Woolf and Dorothy L.
