Gaudy Night (Lord Peter Wimsey, #12)
by Dorothy L. Sayers
Sarah rec! - the vocabulary, hoo boy, I learned a lot, and some of it even applicable to places that aren't Oxford - much more confusing than yr average modern romance novel, and with a fuckload more untranslated Latin - lots of characters have thoughts on eugenics and on the Lower Classes, and at least one on The Jews. It's, uh.... shameless? It's very 1930 up in here. - the gender politics is pretty bleak but fascinating. These are liberated middle and upper class white women in the heart of the empire, seeing what they know they can't get away with vs what they still ideologically believe, vs what they suspect they're being totally repressed and unnatural about, v interesting. Homosociality!!!