Dorothy L Sayers Letters

I have read all of the letters and I disagree with those that think that she is the greatest letter writer of all time.

I like her letters when she first started writing them but after she quit doing books about Wimsey, they became to religious for me.

I like to read letters that tell you what is happening at the time of the letters but I do not want to hear all about the play she was writing for Oxford, I believe.

When any of you read these letters, did you get a bit turned off when she got in to her book, papers and plays on religious subjects or is it just me.

I am not anti - religious but I get tired of reading to much about it in someone letters just as I get tired of reading the details of writing a book or play.

[Dave]

I believe the Sothebys auction last year had some unpublished letters of hers as well. Quite a lot of unique material for the Sayers fans/collectors.

In those days there was no email although there was the telephone, everyone wrote more letters than we do now. That is why so much material from her time and before keeps showing up.

Remember Boswell's Diaries. They were found many years after he died in the Muntions room at the castle. What we would have missed if we had never had those diaries to read and the same with other diaries and letters from different eras.

We know a lot about how DorothyL wrote. How she did her research. I still do wish that she had never become involved in writing religious play and such and wrote more Lord Peter Wimsey. There never could be enough books with him and Harriet Vane in them although I would not miss her if I just had him solving mysteries with Bunter.

An interesting point that people wrote more by hand before e-mail and all that stuff (in fact I find that my handwriting has deteriorated because of using a keyboard for some 35 years, I mostly print now with pen or pencil rather than use the script that was pounded into me as a school kid). That doesn't mean people don't write, of course. What makes the difference between blabbing on a newsgroup or by e-mail or in a chat room, where very little thought is done as far as composition, let alone grammar and spelling, even the sort of reticence one can have before mailing a letter out without revising it.... [Lost track of my sentence here, such is the nature of on-line composition]

Anyway, people like Dorothy Sayers, who had voluminous correspondence, wrote their letters (except the ones to their haberdashers) as carefully as they would have written a school essay. Force of habit, because few of them thought the letters would ever be collected and read by the general public. If they did, like Chesterfield, then that's a different matter. Sayers's religious beliefs were her own business, but apparantly she propogated them to her acquaintances and even her non-detective-story readers. Fine, that's her prerogative. It doesn't mean the letters are worthy to be printed for the benefit of fans of her Wimsey stories who might be mislead into buying the letter collections thinking they might have something important to say about mystery writing.

Boswell's London Diaries, for example, are hard to judge. He wrote them privately, not for publication (but they were written as though they were meant for publication -- this was some sort of ego trip for him). What they reveal is fascinating about his times, but also about his ego -- a whore complaining that his dick was too big, his getting it off with a three-penny 'stand-up' on Westminster Bridge with a 14-yr-old prostitute because he was turned on by the idea of doing it right by Parliament. Pepys was just as bad, but he wrote his diary in code, which wasn't deciphered for nearly 200 years. Whatever the case or circumstance, 'collected letters' or 'posthumous diaries' and the like are a form of vanity, a way of perpetuating one's immortality.
That's not evil, just venal.

I don't mean to be so cynical, but I really have little respect for this sort of posthumous exploitation of notable people. Especially when, as you implied with Sayers, she makes a fool of herself and reputation by carping on religious nonsense.

The fact that Boswell was driven by his ego is well known. His following of Samuel Johnson about taking down everthing that he had to say so that he could write a book about him and have everybody know that they were such good friends.

He wanted to be friends with people of wealth and celibrity. He always made sure that others knew about his friendship with such people.

One thing that I remember in particular but I can't remember the actor. Considering he was one of the most famous actors of his day makes it odd that I can't remember.

They were having the first Stratford Festival. Shakespeare was the one that was really being celebrated. He saw this crowd of people and he saw the actor. He mentiond that they made odd signs to each other and the people wondered at the fact that he knew the actor and what the signs were. The signs were nonsensense. Although today they would be gang signs.

He did a lot of things that he did so he could write about them in his diary. I think that he had mixed emotions about whether to write them for the publication on not. But condsidering that they were found so many years or decades after his death suggests not.

There were to many person things that he indulged in that he was ashamed of when writing the diaries but he wrote about them anyway.