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The Letters of Dorothy L.Sayers: 1944-1950 Vol 3
  

The Letters of Dorothy L.Sayers: 1944-1950 Vol 3 (Hardcover)

by Dorothy L. Sayers (Author), P.D. James (Introduction)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 539 pages
  • Publisher: The Dorothy L.Sayers Society (Jan 1999)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0951800051
  • ISBN-13: 978-0951800058
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1,694,691 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Product Description

Synopsis

The year 1944 was a turning point in the creative life of Dorothy L. Sayers: she began to read Dante. Her letters to Charles Williams conveying her first excitement so amazed him that he planned to publish them, but died before he could do so. After 50 years they can be read here at last, as fresh and vigorous as the day they were written. Her translation of Dante's "Inferno" appeared in 1949 and 50,000 copies were sold at once. In the half century since then, the three volumes of her translation have reached sales of over a million and a quarter. Her letters reveal the creative energy which powered this achievement. Other letters take the reader behind the scenes of her new drama "The Just Vengeance", produced in Lichfield Cathedral in 1946, and of the revival of "The Zeal of Thy House" in Canterbury Cathedral in 1949. Colour plates and photographs of the costumes designed by Norah Lambourne are included, as well as diagrams of Dante's "Inferno" by Wilfred Scott-Giles and original drawings by Sayers herself. These are the concluding years of the war, the period of guided missiles, continuing domestic hardship and the austerities of peace.

Her son marries and gets divorced, her husband falls ill, requiring constant vigilance, and dies. Despite many conflicting demands, Sayers' creative output remains phenomenal, not least the vast number of stimulating, amusing, sometimes exasperated but always immensely readable letters.



About the Author

An Italian scholar and translator, Barbara Reynolds completed the translation of Dante's Divine Comedy which Dorothy L. Sayers left unfinished when she died. Dr Reynolds has told the story of this collaboration in The Passionate Intellect: Dorothy L. Sayers' Encounter with Dante. She has also translated Dante's La Vita Nuova and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and was the general editor of The Cambridge Italian Dictionary. More recently, Dr Reynolds founded the journal Seven, to which she has contributed articles on Dorothy L. Sayers. She is the President of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society, and has frequently lectured at the society's conferences. She is currently working on an edition of the Sayers letters, of which the first three volumes have now appeared. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars a lady of letters . . ., 25 Aug 2000
By A Customer
As Baroness P. D. James states in her preface to this engrossing book, "we have what is in effect an epistolary autobiography" of the young Dorothy L. Sayers, from age five to forty-three, when the author became the household word that she is today. (Later letters comprise volume two.)

The earliest letters are sprinkled with references to poems, plays or short stories that she had written, in any-or all-of the four languages at her command (English, French, German and Latin.) She fell madly in love with the theatre, not to mention the leading men of the era. Before she reached the age of thirteen, she had read (in the original French) The Three Musketeers, and from that time on, referred to her familiy and assorted locations by their assigned names from the book. She took for herself the identity of Athos. At eighteen, her headmistress announced that Dorothy had come top in all England in the Cambridge Higher Local Examinations with distinction in French and spoken German. The following year she entered Somerville College at Oxford.

Men as men didn't enter her life until she had completed Oxford. She fell in love only once, but they couldn't marry due to multiple differences in values. Subsequently, she had a short-lived affair with another man, who was the father of her only child, a son raised by Dorothy's cousin. Their roles were reversed in the boy's life; the cousin was his 'Mum' and Dorothy his aunt. Not until after her death did the truth come out.

These letters bring to vivid life the enigma who was known world-wide as the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey, the perfect foil. She couldn't afford a luxurious flat, a Daimler, or an Axminster carpet; she could, however, provide them for Lord Peter. She made him and his family and his possessions incredibly real for her millions of readers.

Any devotee of Lord Peter Wimsey will be exceedingly grateful to Barbara Reynolds for her years of loving care in sorting through and editing these letters of one of the world's great novelists. We can but wait-patiently-for volume two, in order to learn how Dorothy wore her hard-earned and well-deserved fame.

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