Conundrums for the Long Week-End

Ethan Lewis, Kuhn McGregor Robert

Description

Lord Peter Wimsey-amateur detective, man of fashion, talented musician, and wealthy intellectual-is known to legions of readers. His enduring presence and popularity is a tribute to his creator, Dorothy L. Sayers, who brought Lord Peter to life during "the long week-end" between the First and Second World Wars, as British aristocracy began to change, making way for a modern world. In Conundrums for the Long Week-End, Robert McGregor and Ethan Lewis explore how Sayers used her fictional hero to comment on, and come to terms with, the social upheaval of the time: world wars, the crumbling of the privileged aristocracy, the rise of democracy, and the expanding struggle of women for equality.

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612777238
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Conundrums for the Long Week-End

Conundrums for the Long Week-End

England, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Lord Peter Wimsey

Robert Kuhn McGregor, with Ethan Lewis

The Kent State University Press kent, ohio, & london

© 2000 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242 All rights reserved Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 00-036876 isbn0-87338-665-5 Manufactured in the United States of America

07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McGregor, Robert Kuhn, 1952– Conundrums for the long week-end: England, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Lord Peter Wimsey / Robert Kuhn McGregor, with Ethan Lewis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn0-87338-665-5 (alk. paper)∞ 1. Sayers, Dorothy L. (Dorothy Leigh), 1893–1957—Characters—Lord Peter Wimsey. 2. Detective and mystery stories, English—History and criticism. 3. Wimsey, Peter, Lord (Fictitious character) I. Lewis, Ethan, 1964– II. Title.

pr6037.a95z78 2000 823’.912–dc21

00-036876

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.

Contents  ________________________

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: England, Sayers, and Lord Peter 1

Lord Peter Begins a Career 9 1 Lord Peter Discovers the Possibilities 41 2 Lord Peter Acquires a Soul 81 3 Lord Peter Displays His Range 118 4 Lord Peter Achieves a Balance 155 5 Lord Peter and the Long Week-End 192 6 Appendix A: Coordinated Timeline 211 Appendix B: On Sayers and the Sonnet 217

Notes 223

Bibliography 241

Index 251

Acknowledgments

W e have argued much over the main title of this book, while reaching common ground on the subtitle very easily. This is a book about England, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Lord Peter Wimsey. The ordering of the three subjects is arbitrary; the choices are not. We have endeavored to treat each theme equally: England in its history, Sayers in her artistry, and Lord Peter in his development as a fictional character. We are most interested in exploring the mutual influences of these themes—how each affected and shaped the others. Our claim to originality is in this treatment; certainly any number of authors have treated these topics separately and well. We seek to weave them together, to make a whole and coherent story of Sayers’s development of Wimsey as a reflection of English history. In doing so, we have carefully contemplated Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional work in all its nuances. We have also relied heavily on the foundations laid by generations of excellent scholars.  If we have employed an interpretive model, it is that of Modris Eck- steins, presented in his thoughtful and provocativeRights of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age.Ecksteins argues that the first years of the twentieth century saw the outbreak of cultural warfare in Europe. On the one side stood England: traditional, conservative, the image of restrictive morality and good sportsmanship. On the opposite bank stood Germany (and the United States): antihistorical, experimen- tal, technologically oriented, modern. The Great War saw the clash of

 vii s s

viii Acknowledgments s

these cultural identities. Britain and her allies emerged victorious, but at the cost of their own cultural disintegration. Postwar England embraced Germany’s modern world. Peter Wimsey’s career, we argue, traces the painful process of that modernization.  Many historians, professional and amateur, have addressed the story of England between the world wars. We have taken our tone—and some of our history—fromThe Long WeekEnd,the work of Robert Graves and Alan Hodge. Both were Oxford scholars, neither a historian in the professional sense. Written on the very eve of World War II, their book provides a contemporary look backward over the previous twenty years, concentrating on the social aspects of Britain’s modernization.  Historical information on the period derives from a list of academics far too long to enter here, though we must recognize the critically important work of two scholars. Jay Winter has authored several excellent books on the Great War and its aftermath in Britain; our understanding of the war’s impact would prove sadly inadequate without his work. In viewing Sayers’s work in this historical context, the concept was pioneered by Terrance L. Lewis in hisDorothy L. Sayers’ Wimsey and Interwar Brit ish Society.Lewis studies Sayers’s fiction in the analytical framework of ethnicity, class, and gender so familiar to modern historians.  Turning to the study of Dorothy L. Sayers, we again confront a very long list of most able scholars. Janet Hitchman perhaps paved the way with her most controversialSuch a Strange Lady.James Brabazon became the first to construct a biography employing essentially all of Sayers’s private letters and papers. In our work, we have relied most heavily on the exhaustive research of Barbara Reynolds, whose biography, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul,provides the basic life chronicle we follow. Reynolds also edited the two volumes of Sayers’s published correspondence, an unparalleled mine of information.  A bewildering array of writers have contributed their thoughts and perspectives on Sayers and her work. Two indispensable collections are As Her Whimsey Took Her,edited by Margaret P. Hanay, andDorothy L. Sayers: The Centenary Celebration, edited by Alzina Stone Dale. Dale’s research was also the main source of information on Sayers’s uncompleted manuscript, “Thrones, Dominations,” before its comple- tion and publication by Jill Paton Walsh in 1998.  Our guides through the maze of Sayers material, primary and sec- ondary, published and unpublished, were three in number. Robert B.

Acknowledgments ix s

Harmon and Margaret A. Burger’sAn Annotated Guide to the Works of Dorothy L. Sayersprovides an instructive listing of Sayers’s published work organized by type. C. B. Gilbert’sBibliography of the Works of Dorothy L. Sayerswas especially valuable as a handbook to Sayers’s unpublished writings. Ruth Tanis Youngberg’sDorothy L. Sayers: A Reference Guideprovides an exhaustive listing of secondary perspectives on Sayers, though it is unfortunately becoming rather dated.  Our essential sources for analysis, the Lord Peter stories, are all for- tunately still in print. For the sake of consistency, we have employed the large format HarperPerennial series issued in 1993 (with the exception of The Nine Tailors,still published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Seeking to expand our analysis beyond this readily available material, we have made extensive use of the unpublished Lord Peter material included in the Marion Wade Collection, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. Alicia Pearson, assistant archivist at the Marion E. Wade Center, provided invaluable assistance.  Our fervent desire to gratefully acknowledge our more personal debts is tempered by the fear that we may inadvertently leave someone out. We do thank everyone who has offered wisdom and encouragement, to say nothing of patience, to this project. Our editors, Julia J. Morton and Erin L. Holman, have been steadfast in their support from the outset, which has meant a great deal to us. We also owe a great debt to Professor Marty S. Knepper of Morningside College, Sioux City, Iowa, reader appointed by the Press, who said just the right things at just the right times while offering several most-constructive suggestions. Rest assured that our aversion to conjunctions is not her fault.  Closer to home, several people materially assisted in the formative stages of this work. The students in our team-taught Liberal Studies Col- loquium, offered in Spring 1997, set us on the track. As the thing took shape on paper, our long-suffering readers, Deborah Kuhn McGregor and Judy Everson, saw us through the early incarnations. We bounced ideas off virtually the entirety of the history and English faculties at the University of Illinois–Springfield (and some others as well), including Cecilia Cornell, Larry Shiner, Bill Siles, Steve Egger, Jackie Jackson, Karen Moranski, Razak Dahmane, and Norman Hinton. John Holtz, Linda Kopecky, and Denise Greene shepherded our odd requests through the library. We burdened the history graduate assistant, Carol Watson Lu- brant, with our most abstruse research challenges (When do peaches ripen