![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Dorothy Sayers: A Biography
1/5. An interesting subject in the hands of a bad biographer. Just a sampling of my objections to this book:
-There's the part where the biographer explains that Sayers wasn't antisemitic because, get this, she disliked lots of people not just Jews. Also, prejudice means pre-judging, and she didn't pre-judge, okay, she came to her judgment of Jews after much thought. He has to go through this exercise several times, whenever he quotes something particularly antisemitic that she said or wrote.
-There's the whole thing where Sayers specifically asked that her papers, etc. not be used for any biography for fifty years after her death, but her son and the biographer took it upon themselves to violate that wish because – they each write a self-justifying forward – she didn't really mean it anyway. And also, other people are writing stuff about her, so there. I can only assume one or both of them needed money.
-There's the part where the biographer claims to like Sayers's work, but then mourns the fact she only ever wrote detective fiction, and not any real, "full-fledged" novels.
That's just a sampling.
I tell you what, though, Dorothy Sayers would have been so so obnoxious on twitter with her 104 tweet long screeds about the role of sin.*
*One reason I wish this book was better is that I find her stripe of religiosity interesting. She herself described it as purely intellectual and not at all emotional, which is far from the experience of most people of my acquaintance, and leaves me honestly wondering what the point is. A better biographer could really have engaged with that.
1/5. An interesting subject in the hands of a bad biographer. Just a sampling of my objections to this book:
-There's the part where the biographer explains that Sayers wasn't antisemitic because, get this, she disliked lots of people not just Jews. Also, prejudice means pre-judging, and she didn't pre-judge, okay, she came to her judgment of Jews after much thought. He has to go through this exercise several times, whenever he quotes something particularly antisemitic that she said or wrote.
-There's the whole thing where Sayers specifically asked that her papers, etc. not be used for any biography for fifty years after her death, but her son and the biographer took it upon themselves to violate that wish because – they each write a self-justifying forward – she didn't really mean it anyway. And also, other people are writing stuff about her, so there. I can only assume one or both of them needed money.
-There's the part where the biographer claims to like Sayers's work, but then mourns the fact she only ever wrote detective fiction, and not any real, "full-fledged" novels.
That's just a sampling.
I tell you what, though, Dorothy Sayers would have been so so obnoxious on twitter with her 104 tweet long screeds about the role of sin.*
*One reason I wish this book was better is that I find her stripe of religiosity interesting. She herself described it as purely intellectual and not at all emotional, which is far from the experience of most people of my acquaintance, and leaves me honestly wondering what the point is. A better biographer could really have engaged with that.