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talkingpiffle · 6 days
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The Duke Humfrey’s Library - the oldest reading room in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford.
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talkingpiffle · 8 days
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Father Brown: Beneath the foolish-seeming exterior there lies an analytical, supremely sympathetic man.
Lord Peter Wimsey: Beneath the foolish-seeming exterior there lies an analytical, supremely sympathetic man. Beneath him there lies another very silly man, except this one reads Donne.
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talkingpiffle · 9 days
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Father Brown: Beneath the foolish-seeming exterior there lies an analytical, supremely sympathetic man.
Lord Peter Wimsey: Beneath the foolish-seeming exterior there lies an analytical, supremely sympathetic man. Beneath him there lies another very silly man, except this one reads Donne.
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talkingpiffle · 10 days
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Hi! I just finished reading Gaudy Night, which I bought a while ago after seeing you talk about it. (Thank you so much for spreading the word btw!! I shall now be proselytizing to anyone who will listen.) I absolutely loved it. The mystery was great, the writing was 🤌, but the romance!!! Phew! So nuanced! So refreshing! But I'd love to hear your take on the dog collar thing. What was up with that?? Do you know if it was supposed to be as spicy as it seemed to my 2024 eye?
Hello, Anon, I am so delighted! The Gaudy Night proselytizing spreads!
The dog collar! As spicy as it appears to you? perhaps not. More confidently I would say: probably not spicy in precisely the same way it appears close to a century later. I think that the most significant way it advances intimacy is as the first thing Harriet allows Peter to give her, as he cannot resist pointing out. Because Harriet and Peter (my beloveds) are also terrible at talking directly about their feelings, it also allows them to do that. It allows Harriet a dispassionate (!) experience of Peter's physicality and her own, and I think that matters. And because -- again, I cannot overstate this -- they are terrible at talking directly about their feelings, it allows them to experiment with the vocabulary of claiming ("I have taken your collar away to have my name put on") in a context far removed from their scrupulous intellectual discussions about obligation, desire, and the counterpoint.
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talkingpiffle · 10 days
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Another Lord Peter and Harriet portrait.
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talkingpiffle · 15 days
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i am a woman at war with herself, torn forever between my love of detective fiction and my hatred of cops and cop media
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talkingpiffle · 19 days
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from The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers
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talkingpiffle · 21 days
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funny thing about me reading all of peter wimsey and adoring it: i don't like mysteries. and this series didn't change my mind! i still didn't care much about the crime-solving in these books. that's not why i read them. i decided to try the series despite the genre because i always saw sayers's name mentioned at the same time as dunnett's, so i had to at least try. and what kept me going was the great writing and peter himself.
sayers had a gift for writing witty dialogue. if i had to think of an author who's on the same level as her when it comes to that, i would struggle. and you kinda need to be a master at writing witty dialogue if you have a main character like peter winsey. peter!! i think, while reading the series and talking about it on twitter, my most common reaction: peter my best friend :). one of the most lovable and maybe the most delightful protagonist i've ever had the pleasure of reading about.
i didn't always feel 100% connected to him. one of the things i dislike about mystery fiction is that (in my opinion) it's very episodic and so there's no overarching plot, and the characterization doesn't really take center stage. ask me about one favourite peter moment from bellona club or nine tailors and i could not tell you.
but the thing about this series is, it does end up having a sort of overarching plot that sees it's main characters grow and change and kinda gets them out of the "mystery of the week" formula that i think can make characterization stagnant. and that's the harriet vane storyline.
i can't tell how much better harriet makes peter (and i don't need to tell you because if you've read it, you know). seeing peter from the outside, or from the inside but in this situation that changes his priorities so much, was so good. their banter, their chemistry, their misunderstanding, the way harriet perceives peter, from her repressed feelings to her protectiveness and unconditional love. all of it makes peter a much more compelling character. not to say he wasn't before, because i adored peter from book 2 onwards. but harriet always brought the best in him.
i could say a million things more, but tl;dr is sayers has become one of my all time favourite authors, i will never forget peter wimsey, and i'm both incredibly happy to have read this series and so sad that it's over. now what :')
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talkingpiffle · 22 days
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Episode 23: MURDER MUST ADVERTISE, part 2
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talkingpiffle · 22 days
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Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane my beloved
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talkingpiffle · 27 days
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A little Peter and Harriet sketch.
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talkingpiffle · 1 month
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Look slow burn is great but have you considered: slow burn and the opposite at the same time.
One of them looks at the other for the first time and is like “that one.” Ready to marry them five minutes later. Falls like a ton of bricks.
Other one is completely oblivious to this and fails in love so slowly that they go boiled frog and don’t realise for years that they love the other one back just as fiercely, and have for a while, until it’s “oh” time.
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talkingpiffle · 1 month
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talkingpiffle · 1 month
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Peter, of course, was just as tiresome as he could be, and that is saying a good deal. [...] I was prepared to do everything in my power to see that the thing was done properly, if it had to be done at all. But my mother-in-law took it all out of my hands, though I am sure we were distinctly given to understand that the wedding would take place on the day I had suggested, that is, next Wednesday. But this, as you will see, was just one of Peter's monkey tricks. I feel the slight very much, particularly as we had gone out of our way to be civil to the girl, and had asked her to dinner. Well! Last Monday evening, when we were down at Denver, we got a wire from Peter, which coolly said, "If you really want to see me married, try St. Cross Church, Oxford, to-morrow at two." I was furious—all that distance and my frock not ready, and, to make things worse, Gerald, who had asked sixteen people down for the shooting, laughed like an idiot, and said, "Good for Peter!" [...] Presently the bride and bridegroom vanished, and we waited a long time for them, till my mother-in-law came down, all smiles, to announce that they had been gone half an hour, leaving no address.
helen's letter in busman's honeymoon
At her lying in town this last parliament, I found means to see her twice or thrice we both knew the obligations that lay upon us, and we adventured equally, and about three weeks before Christmas we married. And as at the doing, there were not used above five persons, of which I protest to you by my salvation, there was not one that had any dependence or relation to you, so in all the passage of it, did I forbear to use any such person, who by furthering of it might violate any trust or duty towards you. The reasons, why I did not foreacquaint you with it, (to deal with the same plainness that I have used) were these. I knew my present estate less then fit for her; I knew, (yet I knew not why) that I stood not right in your Opinion; I knew that to have given any intimation of it had been to impossibilitate the whole Matter. And then having those honest purposes in our hearts, and those fetters in our Consciences, me thinks we should be pardoned, if our fault be but this, that we did not by fore-revealing of it, consent to our hindrance and torment.
john donne's letter to sir george more on his marriage to ann more, february 2 1601/1602
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talkingpiffle · 2 months
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4 October.—Went round to Peter’s flat to advise about settings for some stones he picked up in Italy. While there, registered post brought large, flat envelope—Harriet’s writing. Wondered what it was she wanted to send and not bring! (Inquisitive me!) Watched Peter open it, while pretending to examine zircon (such a lovely colour!). He flushed up in that absurd way he has when anybody says anything rather personal to him, and stood staring at the thing till I got quite wound up, and said, “What is it?” He said, in an odd sort of voice, “The bride’s gift to the bridegroom.” It had been worrying me for some time how she'd grapple with that, because there isn’t an awful lot, really, one can give a very well-off man, unless one is frightfully well off oneself, and the wrong thing is worse than nothing, but all the same, nobody really wants to be kindly told that they can’t bring a better gift than their sweet selves—very pretty but so patronising and Lord of Burleigh—and after all, we all have human instincts, and giving people things is one of them. So I dashed up to look, and it was a letter written on a single sheet in a very beautiful seventeenth-century hand. Peter said, “The funny thing is that the catalogue was sent to me in Rome, and I wired for this, and was ridiculously angry to learn it had been sold.” I said, “But you don’t collect manuscripts.” And he said, “No, but I wanted this for Harriet.” And he turned it over, and I could read the signature, “John Donne,” and that explained a lot, because of course Peter has always been queer about Donne. It seems it’s a very beautiful letter from D. to a parishioner—Lady Somebody—about Divine and human love. I was trying to read it, only I never can make out that old-fashioned kind of writing (wonder what Helen will make of it—no doubt she’ll think a gold cigarette-lighter would have been much more suitable)—when I found Peter had got on the phone, and was saying, “Listen, dear heart,” in a voice I’d never heard him use in his life.
–Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon, “Prothalamion,” 1937.
Letter from John Donne to Lady Kingsmill, 26 October 1624. (x, x) (Not necessarily the letter, but there’s not enough detail in the text to identify a specific Donne letter, if Sayers had a real one in mind.)
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talkingpiffle · 2 months
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Marvelous find at the California Antiquarian Book Fair today – Dorothy L. Sayers’s privately printed 1947 Christmas treat, “A Cat’s Christmas Carol”, with six color linocuts by Norah Lambourne, and signed by both the writer and the artist.
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talkingpiffle · 2 months
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I didn't find any Sayers at the Antiquarian Book Fair this year, but did spot this John Donne first edition that Lord Peter might have wanted for his collection.
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