From a feministy perspective, I mean. I've just recently got into them so haven't read that many, but things keep striking me. Not just Sayers herself having a feminist perspective (though she obviously does), but also details about the time period I wouldn't have known about.
The thing that made me smile most recently was in Gaudy Night, she has a conversation between Harriet Vane and one of the dons at her fictional Oxford college, who observe that the women undergraduates have a bad habit of sunbathing in their underwear and really, this is unfair ('not on the [male] undergraduates - they're used to it') on the male dons who might wander through the quad and see them.
It just struck me that it's such a different image from the rather buttoned-up idea of attitudes towards women's bodies I'd expect from that time.
What does anyone else think?
And what do you think of Jill Paton Walsh finishing of Sayers' last unfinished draft and writing continuations? Is it a travesty, or is this the kind of collaboration that feminism ought to be supporting? There being that argument that the 'lone genius author' is a concept that's always associated more with men than with women.
Feminism: Sex and gender discussions
Does anyone want to chat about Dorothy L Sayers' books with me?
LRDtheFeministDragon · 02/06/2013 16:45
Ah, isn't that true of the best books? We love them so much we have to pick them to pieces.
fair - ooh, I like this! I was thinking about fairly recent writers.
There are more Shakespeare ones, I think? ('All for Love' and Westside Story and so on). I think writers that far back weren't so fussed about being 'lone male genius'. People constantly try to finish off Chaucer's unfinished works for him. And the Aeneid as fanfic.
Richardson getting pissed off feels to me closer to the modern ideas about male writers - damn it, it's my book, I get to tell the story, how dare you take the piss?
I did not know about Andrew Motion's sequel - is it any good?
Christine de Pizan wrote continuations or versions of the Troy story, too. One of the things she wrote is a set of Greek myths that were supposed to be written from the goddess Othea to inspire Hector as a teenager. But then she's fab and excellent.
FWIW, I have a couple of US children's books (by Cynthia Voigt), which have a note at the beginning saying that to save money, they have been printed for the UK market with US spellings. They are quite old, though. I don't know if popular US stuff over here, like Sweet Valley or Babysitters' Club, was edited at all but I'm fairly sure a lot of the references stay the same because they seemed very exotic to us.
YY, that makes sense about copyright law. I am wondering now how women and copyright worked - would it effectively belong to their husbands if they were married? It's strange to think, isn't it, but I suppose if your property all belonged to your husband, presumably that included intellectual property?
Rowling is interesting on author power. I wouldn't say she is a plagiarist exactly, but I don't think she is terribly gracious about citing her influences.
With the Chaucer - yes, people tried to round off the unfinished bits by putting new tales in. And lots of people write sort of pseudo-Chaucer texts. It's funny, because when Caxton first printed the Canterbury Tales, he got lots of old gentlemen writing to him in agitation to say they had excellent manuscripts of the book and he was printing it all wrong!
I do seriously think we've got a really different idea of what being an author means, now, though. I find it really interesting that - well, for me anyway - one of the least convincing bits in the Sayers books are the bits where Harriet is talking about what it's like writing detective fiction. I'm not a writer so I don't know, but the way she talks about plotting sounds dead twee and contrived. It's as if she wasn't quite comfortable explaining how she did it.
Thanks seeker. 
doctrine - btw, I saw your name in her books! It made me grin. - yes, fair enough, could be deliberate. I was thinking of the bits in Have His Carcass, and then in Busman's Holiday when she has Kirk thinking about lady detective writers.
Btw, I find the Kirk bits rather cringe-inducing. Maybe this is to do with times having moved on, so that the literary references Peter and Harriet keep tossing about are less obvious and you can sympathise more with Kirk being slower to get them?
fair - I like that too.
seeker It was me talking about Michael Innes! I love his books. You are guaranteed to find words you have to look up in a dictionary in his books. (Perhaps that's only good if you were me. 
)
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Oh sure, IRL you'd want to punch anyone "moderately familiar with the works of minor Elizabethan lyricists" or whatever it was, unless they were undertaking a DPhil in the subject at the time...
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