(no subject)

[raincitygirl]

Young Miss Weaver is failing to grasp the concept of windows. A neighbour cat has been taunting her with his presence on HER patio. However, he is outside the window, and she is inside. He is also twice her size, so the likelihood of me letting her go outside and kick his ass is pretty low. I must admit, though, that he's being exceptionally annoying. Not to me, but to her. It's one thing for him to invade her territory. It's a whole other thing when he sprawls indolently on the deck and looks like he's about to fall asleep. She seems to find his lounging around much more infuriating than when he takes her seriously.

I have been looking for Busman's Honeymoon for the past 10 days, and have finally given up looking. I've bought a new copy from Amazon, not because I think it's one of Dorothy L. Sayers' masterpieces (it's not), but because I am a completist. Not having her whole oeuvre irritates me. Especially when I've looked in every conceivable spot in the entire apartment where a book could be hiding and not found it. On the bright side, while hunting for it, I found several other books that I had also been looking for. But naturally, when I was looking for one particular book, finding some totally different book didn't really make me happy.

Why was Dorothy L. Sayers called Dorothy L. Sayers, anyway? Why not Dorothy Leigh Sayers, or D.L. Sayers, or just plain old Dorothy Sayers? She was English, and I associate the Firstname Middle Initial Lastname convention with Americans.

Comments

[legionseagle]

My understanding is that she strongly disliked using the form Dorothy Sayers because she associated it with boarding school, a time in her life when she had been deeply unhappy. While I don't know that these were the reasons, I can also imagine that "Dorothy Leigh Sayers" might have given rise to a suspicion that she was social climbing, by claiming a double-barrelled name to which she was not entitled (for example Patrick Leigh Fermor was the son of Lewis Leigh Fermor; it's not a middle name in those cases) and DL Sayers might have implied she was trying to disguise her sex, a la U K le Guin.

But I don't really get the constant policing of what women are allowed to call themselves; if she liked the form "Dorothy L. Sayers" and it looked good on a dust-jacket, why shouldn't she use it?

[sollers]

Beat me to it; I'll just add, for completeness, that middle given names are quite common; I have two and so did my late husband, and my daughters have one each - a convenient way of naming them for people on both sides of the family. The thing is, though, except in very posh families who want to draw attention to family connections it won't be anything like the mother's maiden name, and when women marry and take their husband's surname they don't keep their maiden name as part of their new name.

[legionseagle]

Yes; I suppose if we're going with the "How dare Dorothy L. Sayers have the cheek to decide how she wanted to be addressed and stick with it" theme, she really should have been called "Mrs Atherton Fleming" on all books published after - 1926, was it?