Austen Citing Index

Jane Austen Society of Australia

Austen citing:
Dorothy L Sayers 

Dorothy L Sayers in a letter to the Rev Eric Thornton, Chief Organising Secretary of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. 23 May, 1946, when Dorothy Sayers had started translating Dante. The Rev Thornton had asked her to devise a pageant to represent Dante's Divine Comedy, possibly for performance at Albert Hall. Sayers wrote back explaining that it would be impossible because of the scale, because of the hugeness of Hell, six rivers and a 1500ft high Satan, etc:

That is the background against which Dante displays the whole course of human history, the whole structure of a society in decay, the entire corruption of which the human heart is capable.

Through  this colossal landscape creep the tiny figures of Virgil and Dante, the most gracious, the most delicate-humorous and the most intimately drawn pair of companions who ever stepped through a work of fiction outside the novels of Jane Austen. All their charm is in a look, a gesture, a turn of the sentence. A vast stage would lose them altogether; yet no stage would be vast enough to even suggest the architecture of the Inferno.'

Dorothy L Sayers Letters, Vol 3 (1944-50), 
edited by Barbara Reynolds

More domestically, demonstrating how broadly Jane Austen touched her life, Sayers wrote to CS Lewis, 2 June 1947

Looking forward to the confidently-expected food-crisis, I have purchased two Hens. In their habits they display, respectively Sense and Sensibility, and I have therefore named them Elinor and Marianne. Elinor is a round, comfortable, motherly-looking little body, who lays one steady, regular undiminished egg per day, and allows nothing to disturb her equanimity (except, indeed, the coal-cart, to which both take exception). Marianne is leggier, timid, and liable to hysterics. Sometimes she lays a shell-less egg, sometimes a double yolk, sometimes no egg at all. On the days when she lays no egg she nevertheless goes and sits on the nest for the usual time, and seems to imagine that nothing more is required. As my gardener says: ‘She just thinks she’s laid an egg’. Too much imagination – in fact, Sensibility. But when she does lay an egg it is larger than Elinor’s.

Later letters to Norah Labourne that year disclose ‘the sudden and mysterious death of poor Elinor under distressing circumstances’, and two new pullets – Jane and Elizabeth.

A letter of 25 July, 1952 to Professor Cesare Foligno, retired professor of Italian at Oxford University, discussed the translating of Dante:

I was, as a matter of fact, rather careful not to say that Dante had an ‘English sense of humour’. His humour is actually so far from being that, that most English critics say roundly that he has none. That is why the only English writer I could find to compare him to was Jane Austen, who is by no means typical of ‘English’ humour, being malicious, witty and dry.

from Vol 3 (1944-50) & Vol 4 (1951-57) of DLS’s letters, 
(\edited by Barbara Reynolds

Harriet Veitch

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10 June 2002

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