Dorothy L. Sayers: Difference between revisions

 

 

 

Before the detective fiction career took off, she worked as a copywriter at a London advertising agency, where she worked on a long-running series of ads for Guinness and created a sensationally successful viral marketing campaign for Colman's Mustard. (Some years later, she set one of her Lord Peter mysteries in an advertising agency.)

Stung by the vehemence of her rebuttal, literary critics attacked Sayers personally, claiming that Vane, an erudite Oxford-educated mystery writer, was a blatant [[Author Avatar]] created to allow Sayers to vicariously "marry" Lord Peter. This bizarre theory unfortunately gained credence due to a number of factors. Sayers was fiercely protective of her privacy, so much so that few knew of her (for the time) romantically adventurous personal life.<ref> Although her devastating affair with the novelist John Cournos was never actually consummated, she became sexually involved with a motorcyclist and mechanic named Bill White by whom she became pregnant. In order to spare the feelings of her family, as well as to retain her advertising job, she kept her condition secret, giving the boy to a cousin to raise; even her son himself did not realize that she was his biological mother until he was grown. Her subsequent marriage to "Mac" Fleming was troubled, but ultimately enduring.</ref> Many critics, those who knew her only by her Christian writings and her superficial physical appearance, assumed she was a pathetic, dried-up old [[Les Yay|lesbian]] who had created Harriet so she could have a vicarious love affair without subjecting herself to tiresome sex. (Keep in mind that lesbianism was seen at the time not as active attraction to women but as rejection of sex, since naturally [[All Women Are Prudes|sex was for and about men]].) This theory arose during Sayers's lifetime and became one of her [[Berserk Button|Berserk Buttons]] -- in fact, she went as far as to deny that Vane was an [[Author Avatar]] <ref>despite the fact that Sayers had adapted her relationship with Cournos into the Harriet Vane/Philip Boyes affair with some specificity</ref> -- and it gained momentum after her death. It's only since the recent publication of a frank biography and of her own letters that critics have realized just how far off the mark these ideas actually were.

 

 

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** ''The Divine Comedy, Part 1: Hell'' (1949) -- Translated from the ''[[Divine Comedy|Commedia]] (Inferno)'' of Dante Alighieri (Italian)

** ''The Divine Comedy, Part 2: Purgatory'' (1955) -- Translated from the ''[[Divine Comedy|Commedia]] (Purgatorio)'' of Dante Alighieri (Italian)

** ''The Divine Comedy, Part 3: Paradise'' (1962) -- Translated from the ''[[Divine Comedy|Commedia]] (Paradiso)'' of Dante Alighieri (Italian) -- Incomplete; finished by Dr. Barbara Reynolds

 

*** This ''may'' be because Dorothy ''Sayer'' was a popular 1920s London burlesque queen. With Sayers, though, you can never tell.

*** According to Sayers' letters, it was indeed because she was confused with the other lady, whose press-clippings were occasionally erroneously sent to her, and also because she thought leaving the "L" out induced people to pronounce her name as an "ugly spondee", "Say-Ers," instead of her preferred monosyllabic "Sairs."

** [[Executive Meddling]], such as nearly happened in the case of her radio-play, ''The Man Born To Be King''. When the BBC Children's Hour insisted on its right to control its content, she sent them a letter, stuffed with the tiny torn-up pieces of her contract.

** Nearly at the end of her life, she was outraged by the novelist Robert Graves's sneering translation of the [[Ancient Rome|Roman]] poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus -- some two thousand years after Lucan's death.

* [[Cultural Translation]]: In her translation of the [[Divine Comedy]]

* [[Deadpan Snarker]]: Many, but the Empress Helena in her play ''The Emperor Constantine'' is a stand-out example.

* [[Doctor's Orders]]: In ''The Man Born To Be King'', Herod's doctor speaks quite firmly with him.

* [[Forgiveness]]: ''The Emperor Constantine''

* [[Offing the Offspring]]: Happens to Crispus in ''The Emperor Constantine''

* [[Ritual Magic]]: In ''The Devil To Pay'', Sayers' take on the [[Faust]] legend, Mephistopheles is conjured by rituals that Sayers found in actual [[The Renaissance|Renaissance]] [[Tome of Eldritch Lore|grimoires]]. Moreover, she contrasts the simplicity of [[Jesus]]'s miracles with the complicated spells of sorcerers in ''The Man Born to Be King''.

* [[Smug Snake]]: Shadrach, in ''The Man Born To Be King''.

* [[Unreliable Narrator]]: Some of the letters in ''The Documents in the Case'' are written by them.