The issue of women's right to academic education is central to the book's plot. The lecturers of Shrewsbury College are veterans of the prolonged struggle for academic degrees for women, which Oxford granted only reluctantly. The Fellows of the college are surprised and a bit dismayed at the attitude of their students, who take for granted this right for which such a hard struggle had to be fought.
Sayers had herself been one of the first women to obtain an Oxford University degree, having been awarded first-class honours in the mediaeval literature examinations of 1915.[8] She attended Somerville College, the basis for the fictional Shrewsbury College of the plot.[9]
