‘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.