Feminists who are Lord Peter fans......

Which one did you read, Carefully?

I think it's intellectual snobbery rather than straight classism - she's broadly sympathetic to anyone with a desire to think deeply, read widely and aim to 'better themselves'.

(I was terrified of being found out as an intellectual lightweight at university and having some shrewd middle-aged Dean kindly tell me that I had a 'small, summery kind of brain with the staying power of a mayfly'...)

I shouldn't be commenting on this thread because I've only read one, so just ignore me, but I'm interested and kind of thinking out loud.

The classism is spectacular, yes. Even bearing in mind the time she was writing, and that characters are characters and not the author, I thought there was so much author coming through, intrusively, and I didn't like her. I don't need to like characters in a book or find them sympathetic, and am happy reading many books with views very much of their time. But there was something so jarring and unpleasant to me about this author's voice, but there is so much love for these books and I feel confused by my reaction. Maybe I came to them too old. For example, I read a Monica Dickens book called Marianne when I was about 11 and liked it, but reading it now I see classism and sexism I didn't at the time, yet still find it a cosy, comfort read and can set those things aside.

Sorry to ramble unhelpfully on an interesting thread.

Sorry, I meant contemporary readers, not friends.

Sayers lived with (? not sure) and had a son with a lover who was possibly a bit below her intellectual level.

Back to Busman's Honeymoon -- I think little Miss Twitterton was probably quite frightened of both her cow-hand father and her nasty-tempered uncle. She probably took it out on the chickens.

I'd love to know, without prejudice of 21st eyes, how Sayers appeared to her contemporaries. Exactly how shocking or not that Harriet had lived with her lover in Strong Poison etc. And how Annie Wilson was seen at the time.

I noticed a bit in The Nine Tailors when I re-read it recently, about Mary Thoday, whose first husband was a bastard but whose second is portrayed positively.

"He guessed her to be about forty, though, as is frequently the case with country women, she had lost most of her front teeth and looked older."

It's slipped in so casually.

I have found my thread ☺️

There were all those letters as well that were published in war time. I want to read them!

Back to the Busman's Holiday quote - I'd always noticed it too. But the context is that the woman clutching Harriet was older, unmarried, and had been led on by the murderer (not a nice man) who later in the book completely humiliated her. She might have had every reason to be scared of men. Think it's also written in a pretty ironic way - the "explosion" is about bottles of wine which have been shaken up...

Interesting. I read Gaudy Nights recently because I'd seen it recommended on here. I hated it. I thought it was full of the most horrible attitudes from women towards other women, and did not find it at all enjoyable.

Thank you!

I now need a plane ticket to Illinois and a plausible excuse for going and reading just those fragments, in order to have her voice back in my ear.

Found it! Sounds even more fragmented than I remembered.

www.greenbay.co.uk/books/folio.html

Me too, Lancelottie. I tried to google and find out once. IIRC, DLS wrote the first six chapters or so and left notes and the odd bit of drafting for the rest.

I would also like to see Miss de Vine's take on the current 'forcing oneself into appropriate feelings'. A propos of nothing in particular, of course.

I would love to read just the bits DLS wrote in Thrones, Dominations. I doubt she wrote the tosh about sitting stiffly at opposite ends of the table, for one.

Betcha she did write the line in which Peter says he's callening his child Kerenhappuch, and the one in which the elderly relative eyes Harriet and says, unexpectedly, 'Good girl.'

"She's very sound on sexual consent."

Agree. Which is why...

..the discussion about the victim in T,D annoys me; I believe that DLS wrote the first third or so and I really don't think her LPW/Parker would've been so... dismissive.

I think the 'riding rough-shod' bit was self-criticism from Harriet re 'overthinking' - unable to trust her feelings, she was trying to make the intellectual case for marriage/celibacy and was tired of being trapped and indecisive.

Oh yes, Mrs Grimethorpe! And come to that, the other driving-a-chap-wild woman in the same book. Clearly not quite the same species as your decently reserved and intellectual English woman.

No, you haven’t, but the context means that English makes sense, I think:
‘I have now completely given myself away. No English vocabulary. No other Englishwoman.’
Or something like that.

It was the 'no English woman' thing that stuck in my craw ...

(Hope I'm not mis-remembering.)

(approximately, as I can't find the book):

But yeah, wot meditrina said.

Good point, Med - though there's also that odd little exchange when they're in bed together "Did you just call me 'my lord'? Two words I never thought I'd get a kick out of." I wonder, was there a hint in Sayers' personality of perhaps being a bit like the sort of woman I've talked to occasionally, both on here and in RL, who is totally in control in their working and outside of bed lives, and finds it relaxing to be a sub in bed because it's "time off" from being in control?