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Agatha Christie & Dorothy Sayers, Part II
by Subaru Diane
Many thanks to everyone for such a thoughtful and lively thread two weeks ago! I hope we’ll keep the energy going tonight as we focus on World War I (aka the “Great War”), its immediate and lingering impacts on English life, and how Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie portrayed those war-induced social changes in their fiction.
Three-quarters of a million British men died in the Great War; twice as many returned home permanently damaged by battlefield wounds or the effects of poison gas or “shell shock” (PTSD). Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey was one of them.
Additionally, about a quarter of a million Belgian refugees fled to Britain during the war — the largest ever single displacement of populations into the U.K. Christie’s Hercule Poirot was one of them.
The Great War is a lingering presence in every one of the Wimsey novels — sometimes prominently, sometimes more fleetingly. But it is always there.
In most of her books, conversely, Christie seldom mentions the War or invokes it as a cause of the sweeping societal changes taking place.
What are your thoughts about the authors’ different ways of dealing with the Great War in their fiction?
columbusqueen
For what it’s worth, I prefer Sayers’ approach, because I think it’s a far more accurate reflection of the war’s effect on English society.
M31
Something I noted in both Christie and Sayers is that the destruction and chaos of the war allowed for cases of assumed or hidden identities. I can’t remember details now but in the Nine Tailors there is a ‘lost’ soldier who stays in France under a new name, and Poirot has at least one case where one survivor of a whole group killed by a shell takes on the identity of another.
Very convenient for mystery writers, it is.
SiubhanDuinne
We learn about Lord Peter’s shell-shock in the very first book in the series, Whose Body? And, as mentioned, there are allusions to his war experiences in most of the subsequent novels. But it’s not until the final book in the series, Busman’s Honeymoon, that we get a comprehensive back story. Here’s Lord Peter’s mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver, talking with Harriet Vane, Peter’s new bride:
Annie
You are quite right and it’s rather odd since Sayers and Christie both went through World War I as young women, nearly the same age — Christie was born in 1890, Sayers in 1893.. Reading Christie’s books as an adult, I came to realize that she was very conservative at heart, and I think she wrote about England as she wished it was, and ignoring most social changes was part of that.
Look forward to other comments about this.
Elizabelle
Yay. Happy to see another of these threads!
Steeplejack found free online resources for the Lord Peter Wimsey novels. Look forward to reading them, for the first time, on a medium their creator could not have imagined.
(Still prefer paper books, but free is free. And our local library does not have the whole series, alas.)
Carry on.
Annie
@SiubhanDuinne:
And then the Dowager Duchess goes on to describe how Bunter came to work for Lord Peter. I got tears in my eyes the first time I read that.
oatler
When will we get a miniseries about Young Tolkien in the trenches? Could happen.
SiubhanDuinne
@Annie:
True, they were very close in age. But by the end of 1914, just a few months into the War, Agatha had married Archie Christie, a highly-decorated pilot who retired with the rank of Colonel. She worked as a nurse and as an apothecary’s dispenser, and wrote her first Poirot book in 1916 (though it wasn’t published until 1920). Sayers had a couple of unhappy love affairs before she eventually married Atherton “Mac” Fleming. She had already given Lord Peter the nasty war experiences and lingering PTSD; as it turned out, Mac Fleming was similarly afflicted and grew worse throughout the marriage.
Sayers was still at Oxford and then taking bookselling and publishing jobs.
SiubhanDuinne
@Annie:
I was going to blockquote that as well, but it’s a little long. But I can, easily. I love it too.
I also adore the scene in Gaudy Night where Padgett, the Shrewsbury College porter, recognises Wimsey as his old commanding officer. The two of them begin reminiscing about being buried alive in the trenches and details of Army discipline and catching up on former comrades-in-arms. It’s a touching and telling passage (and, incidentally, hilariously funny).
Pappenheimer
I’d thought that British war dead in WWI were even worse than the numbers listed here – it seems they were. Wiki says 880,000. about 6% of the adult male population.
columbusqueen
@oatler: There was a movie about the wartime JRRT with Nicholas Hoult & Lily Collins. It got mixed reviews.
Mike in NC
@Pappenheimer: Include the British Commonwealth for the figure to include Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, India, etc. losses
SiubhanDuinne
@Pappenheimer:
I’ve seen that number as well. I had the more conservative figure in mind and just went with it. Either way, an almost incalculable loss. And of course while the men were away getting gassed and buried alive and blown to smithereens, the women back home were cutting their hair, shortening their skirts, and going outside the home to work in shops and offices and factories. And since a great many of the fighting men came from the working and servant classes, their lives — when they returned home — were utterly upended.
Tehanu
@oatler: The movie “Tolkien” includes some war scenes. It got only fair reviews but I greatly enjoyed it. If you want to read a mystery centered in the WWI trench warfare, you should try Anthony Price’s award-winning Other Paths to Glory. I’m also extremely fond of Barbara Hambly’s Those Who Hunt the Night series; the 6th or 7th book in the series, Pale Guardian, is actually set in a front-line hospital.
zhena gogolia
@SiubhanDuinne: that is a great scene
Annie
@SiubhanDuinne:
There’s a lot in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club about the bitterness of World War I veterans who came “home” — only to find that “home” had changed immensely. I don’t recall anything like that in Christie’s books.
KjsBrooklyn
Not sure if this comment is appropriate, but I highly recommend the Maisie Dobbs mystery series, which focus very much on the effects of the war on women, and those who survived. (I do love Lord Peter, despite some incidental anti-semitism)
SiubhanDuinne
@zhena gogolia:
If you can, try to get your hands on Ian Carmichael’s audiobook narration (note: NOT the BBC dramatisations!) That scene alone is worth the price of admission :-)
raven
If you are in a time zone where you can watch 60 minutes catch the segments on dogs and cancer.
Gvg
I would not agree that Christie ignored the impact of the war. I thought she alluded to it constantly, just not in the same way. Her views were of the economics of a shortage of labor and the breakup of empire. She did not really examine why these things were happening, but they were mentioned constantly. Miss Marple could never find a reliable gardener, young men left for jobs in cities and factories, quite a few maids never married and the war was sometime given as a reason. A lot of people were poorer than they used to be, etc. Many people had come back from the colonies and the army was smaller, taxes were higher and sugar was expensive and on and on.
I don’t think Christie actually thought about it much. She analyzed people not societies or economics so unless she had known someone personally I don’t think she would have thought about she’ll shock, and if she had, it would have been about one character, not a whole set of people.
Annie
@KjsBrooklyn
I like the Maisie Dobbs books, but of course they are written by a contemporary author, looking back at that era. In the latest book — can’t recall the title — Maisie takes a school teacher to task for how she handled (IIRC) an incident of bullying, and it reads like it’s straight out of a 21st-century parenting manual. Hard to believe, for me anyway, that a parent in the 1940s would have discussed the situation as we would today.
SiubhanDuinne
@Annie:
The closest I’ve found is in Christie’s The A.B.C. Murders, in which one of the suspects, ex-Army, sells stockings door-to-door. The context suggests that this was a fairly commonplace circumstance for returned and wounded soldiers.
I was hoping someone would bring up Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. Thank you. It is quite harrowing in its depiction of George Fentiman, whose own shell shock prevents him from holding a job. He is so resentful that his loving and capable wife is the family breadwinner.
oatler
@Tehanu:
A whole world of fiction I knew nothing of until now.
H.E.Wolf
Yes! And going outside the home to serve in various capacities at the actual front lines in Europe, as well.
A good compendium of first-hand accounts (not limited to British women) is Women and the Great War, edited by Joyce Marlow, published by Virago Press.
Thank you very much for this series, particularly the sections on Dorothy Sayers!
SiubhanDuinne
@Gvg:
I don’t disagree at all. I could have been clearer when I said “In most of her books, conversely, Christie seldom mentions the War or invokes it as a cause of the sweeping societal changes taking place.” She certainly alludes often to the many changes taking place at what must have seemed a dizzying pace; she just (to this reader, anyhow) doesn’t directly connect the changes to the War. And mostly, when she does mention the War, it is as part of a character description of a retired officer or perhaps a war widow or orphan.
Annie
@SiubhanDuinne:
Hey, happy to help. Yes, George Fentiman was absolutely rotten to his wife — Sheila, if I recall properly. It’s interesting that Sayers, given her progressive views, found it perfectly OK that George did not want to ask his wealthy aunt for money, or even visit her because it would look like he was cultivating her for money, while being really awful to Sheila.
SiubhanDuinne
@H.E.Wolf:
Thank you! I appreciate the book recommendation!
Princess
If anyone is curious about this generation’s experience of WW1, I recommend Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. Dorothy Sayers, who was in the same college as Britain, gets some mentions at the end.
(Alas, Brittain turned into a stone cold anti-Semite in her memoirs of her later life so I can’t recommend them but this one is fine)
Sister Golden Bear
Folks might enjoy Lucy Worsley’s three-part biography about Agatha Christie. It’s available for free on YouTube, albeit the bootleg audio quality isn’t great. Probably also available on BBC.
SiubhanDuinne
@Sister Golden Bear:
Good to know, thanks! I read her (fairly recent) bio of Christie a couple of months ago but haven’t yet watched the accompanying video. Maybe something to do tonight since I’m not a fan of awards shows and am thus not watching the Oscars 😁
Sister Golden Bear
@Annie:
Years ago I read a book about genre fiction that observed one of the appeals of the Agatha Christie-style murder mystery (all the way through Jessica Fletcher), is that fundamentally it’s about disorder being introduced and then the social order being restored.
In contrast to the hard-boiled/film noir style of murder mystery. (“Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”) Or the sly ways that the Glass Onion movies play with the genre’s convention. I.e. justice is done, but “order” isn’t restored in conventional ways.)
Sister Golden Bear
@SiubhanDuinne: I linked to the first of the video, but you may need to search a little on YouTube to find the other two.
Larch
Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell series is also very much about the post-Great War world – well, the series starts during the war but the next, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, is explicitly about societal reactions to the increased roles women had taken during the war and were reluctant to give up. (As the series goes on the war gradually recedes, as it did in real life, with mounting glimmers of the conflicts to come.)
To be more on-topic, I believe it’s in Monstrous Regiment that Mary Russell attends a party and meets Lord Pete Wimsey, quite recently back from the front and still very shell-shocked, so pre-Whose Body?
Chacal Charles Calthrop
I have not read more than two or three books by either, but Sayers stuck me as much more honest about the war — and much else.
Christie, on the other hand, never seems to fail to highlight what everyone at the time thought of the triumphs of the British empire — everyone’s study is full of interesting things brought back from India, everyone retired in the local village served honorably overseas in the army for decades, and don’t get me started on that one that took place on the cruise ship on the Nile. I found Christie’s smug self-congratulation on the British civilizing influence, which somehow inexorably led to a lot of money and stuff in England, to be off-putting.
But of course these books were written for entertainment; they’re not going to be politically correct now.
Another Scott
I enjoy this series. I wish I had more to contribute. I’ve read a few AC stories and seen a couple of movies and a zillion Poirot episodes on PBS. No DS (yet).
I agree that The Great War had a huge effect on the UK and it’s there in AC’s stories to varying degrees. How could it not be?
I’m a big John Singer Sargent fan. His Gassed painting is powerful. I saw it in DC years ago when it was on tour with some of his portraits.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
SiubhanDuinne
@Sister Golden Bear:
Thanks! I’ll find ‘em!
Larch
@SiubhanDuinne: & @Gvg: Huh. Now you mention it I do remember all those references, but I don’t remember them ever being attributed to a particular cause. But I was in grade school & high school when I read most of my Christie, so any allusion to the war probably would’ve sailed right by me, at least in grade school. :)
Annie
@Sister Golden Bear:
I think that’s part of what drew me to Christie. I started reading her books in my early teens at a time when my family was very chaotic. Not because of any plan, just people clashing, plus the usual adolescent upheaval. I found the idea of order being restored very consoling.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I never connected well with Christie, but I went through a streak of reading all of Sayers. Whimsey’s mix of inherited prestige and war-induced vulnerability was the most intriguing part. I particularly like Gaudy Night because of the university setting
J
@KjsBrooklyn:
It’s been years since I read Dorothy Sayers, whose books I love. Still I think she (and her main character) can be defended against the charge of incidental anti-semitism. The victim in ‘Whose Body?’ is Jewish, and as I recall he and his marriage to his non-Jewish wife are treated with considerable respect. If memory serves, if anything there are occasions on which Wimsey is anti-anti Semitic, though in way that is likely to strike us as heavy-handed (more attention is paid to the fact a character is Jewish than we’d like–being Jewish is treated as something especially worth noticing–and Jewish characters are ‘typed’, though DS, through PW, insists there is nothing at all wrong with being of the type). Compare Buchan. The Thirty-nine Steps, (the book not the movie, which really is much better than the book) is full not only of casual anti-semitic stereotypes (stock brokers committing suicide) but also a nonsensical foreign Jewish plot to take over Britain (repudiated in the last pages of the book, possibly because an editor objected).
Splitting Image
@Annie:
When I read through most of Christie’s books, it wasn’t in anything like chronological order, but I seem to remember that the post-WWI books were all about young people exulting in the new opportunities they had (Bundle Brent, Tommy and Tuppence, the couple in Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, etc.)
On the other hand, the post-WWII books tended to be about old people trying to survive in a world being torn apart by those awful young people with those awful fashions and music styles, with no respect for their elders, etc., etc. So difficult to get proper servants these days, don’t you know. Complaining about death duties. And strange people of every kind moving into the neighbourhood. And on and on. Passenger to Frankfurt was batshit insane.
I think that in Christie’s world, the First World War didn’t change things too much for her, and may even have made her life better, while the Second World War brought a lot of unwelcome changes. Tolkien remarked in his intro to LOTR that by the end of WWI, all but one of his friends were dead.
Sayers’ experience may have been closer to Tolkien’s. Certainly Wimsey’s was.
J
@Sister Golden Bear:
The classic statement of the idea that detective fiction is about the restoration of order is a terrific short essay by W.H. Auden (a confessed addict to detective fiction) called ‘The Guilty Vicarage’–highly recommended.
NotMax
Decent film about the hospitalization for shell shock and WW1’s affect on the subsequent life of British poet Siegfried Sassoon, Benediction.
Currently streaming on Kanopy and on Hulu.
Annie
@Splitting Image:
There’s a long passage in A Murder is Announced about this — not really knowing who anyone is, they didn’t bring letters of introduction from someone who knew the people at The Big House. There are also 3 characters in that book who are not who they say there are.
The government in power at the end of World War I stayed in power til 1922, whereas Churchill was sent off before World War II was even over and replaced with the Labour PM Clement Attlee. I wonder if, because of this, Christie may have felt more dislocation after the Second World War than after the First.
tokyocali (formerly tokyo ex-pat)
WWI seemed to be the death knell to the class strata and ways of doing things as they had been done before. There had been strains against the system with the rise of the suffragettes and the anarchists, but WWI was a shock to the system, which was followed soon after by the Great Depression and WWII.
Agatha Christie was the first adult mystery author I got into. I think I was 12 years old. I read everything I could get except Curtain. I refused to read a book that killed off the hero detective. If I didn’t read it, he couldn’t be dead. It’s been many years since I read Christie. I picked up some Sayers books not long ago b/c they were free on Amazon and Audible at one point. To my mind, Sayers focused more on character while Christie was the queen of plots.
Historical mysteries are rather popular with readers and there are a number of series out there by contemporary authors. The main issues are that many are written by American authors who do not get the language or setting right. Historical accuracy is also called out by reviewers.
One mystery series I can recommend is by Karen Baugh Menuhin. Her character is a former WWI pilot named Heathcliff Lennox. I’ve listened to the books on Audible with narrator Sam Dewhurst-Phillips, who does a phenomenal job with voices and comedic timing. The mysteries touch on the crumbling class structure, the rise of the Americans, and the changing world economy.
Catnaz
kalakal
@Sister Golden Bear:
This, I think, is the key to Agatha Christie, and also the key to her enduring popularity. The world is constantly changing and nobody in history has ever been comfortable with every change. Christie herself harked back to an eternal, idealised Edwardian world. That world was shattered forever by WW1 and her characters are often people whose world was irrevocably changed by that war and have never recovered. In her books there are no loose ends, no ultimate ambiguities, after the outrage, the world is restored.
Sayers approaches it more directly by having her main character shell shocked ( as the terminology then was ) by his experiences in WW1. She also describes how the world has changed, brasher, less deferential, less rigid.
Murder must Advertise* is I think the book where she goes into this most, the London social scene and night clubs, the people in the advertising agency, all would have been unthinkable before WW1.
As an aside Jane Austen somehow managed to not even mention the Napoleonic Wars at all in any of her novels, despite the fact her brothers took part in them and that to England it was a 15 year existential crisis
* my favourite book of hers
something fabulous
@KjsBrooklyn: Ah yes, was just trying to remember that series! Have just read the first one so far; liked it very much. Thanks!
Heidi Mom
@Princess: I haven’t read the book, but I thought the movie version with Alicia Vikander and Kit Harington was very good.
Andrya
Sayers not only dealt with shell shock/PTSD but also with the loss of belief that so many WW1 vets experienced after the war- loss of belief in church, state, and culture. Lord Peter expresses passionate hatred of war in Gaudy Night- and a lack of belief that the government can manage international relations to prevent it. (Which turned out to be true, of course.). At the end of Busman’s Honeymoon, Harriet said to Peter (about the coming conviction/execution of the murderer) “If there is a God or a judgment… what have we done?”
Sayers also wrote a gripping short story (Blood Sacrifice) in which a starving playwright (also a WW1 vet) writes a bitter, cynical play attacking the cultural attitudes that lead to British acceptance of WW1. He puts his whole heart, and his trauma during the war, into the play. The play is accepted by a popular, successful producer (presented very sympathetically) who turns the play into a sentimental melodrama with the exact opposite message. Murder ensues. Another amazing twist- the murder is committed without the murderer moving or speaking or doing anything at all while committing the murder.
ETA: In saying the British government failed to prevent WW2, I am NOT saying Nazi Germany should have been appeased. On the contrary, a strong reaction to the invasion of the Rhineland and a refusal to fold at Munich might have got Hitler to back down.
stinger
@Princess: I was just going to mention Testament of Youth! Also K.A. Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider.
Imagine surviving the horrors of WWI, at the front or at home, with 20 million people dying over 4 years, just as influenza sweeps the world, killing at least twice that many in a matter of months. The most likely to die, from either cause: young adults, and especially pregnant women. What an impact on society. And, one would think, an ineradicable subtext to all literature of the time.
Annie
This has been a great thread. Look forward to the next one on March 26, but have to go cook dinner now. (No Bunter in this household unfortunately.)
stinger
@Gvg: What with all the deaths, rural exodus, displaced persons, etc., the old established order was gone, no one knew their neighbors’ grandparents any more, and anyone could call themselves Major or Colonel and get away with it (and sundry crimes, to boot).
kalakal
Sayers had stopped writing detective fiction by WW2 and Christie, if I recall correctly, doesn’t seem to mention it much at all
Margery Allingham’s best book, The Tiger in the Smoke, is set post WW2, the villains are mostly disaffected vets, some with PTSD, trained killers without a cause.
An author who not only worked out his own wartime traumas but examined those who never recovered in his books was Nicholas Monserrat. He wrote several short stories, notably The Ship that Died of Shame and Licenced to Kill about vets, displaced in a post war world turning to crime.
kalakal
@Princess: Yes, it’s very revealing.
Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That is very good
Splitting Image
@kalakal:
I read Murder Must Advertise when I was working for an advertising company proofreading ads before they were printed. A major plot point in the book is that a proofreader catches a mistake right before press time, unexpectedly messing up the criminal’s carefully-laid schedule. I’ve always been fond of that book because of that.
Omnes Omnibus
I vastly prefer Sayers’s approach. But then, I generally prefer Sayers to Christie (I loathe Poirot).
zhena gogolia
@kalakal: Fanny’s brother in Mansfield Park is on active duty in the navy, and Wentworth in Persuasion makes his fortune in the wars.
Wolvesvalley
Austen didn’t completely ignore the Napoleonic wars. The militia plays an important role in Pride and Prejudice, and the navy in Persuasion. The conclusion of Pride and Prejudice alludes to “the restoration of peace,” and the conclusion of Persuasion to “the dread of a future war.” Her audience was well aware of the background.
ETA I wrote and posted this before reading zhena gogolia’s comment. Of course I should have remembered William’s naval career in Mansfield Park.
SiubhanDuinne
Great comments, everyone! Thank you! Next time (March 26, two weeks from tonight) we’ll get into the changes in women’s lives between the wars — socially, politically, economically, educationally, sexually. And we’ll talk about the great mysteries central to our authors’ personal lives — Sayers’s secret out-of-wedlock son, and Christie’s notorious eleven-day disappearance.
kalakal
@zhena gogolia: It’s a while since I read it but isn’t he just described as being on naval service in the West Indies?
@Wolvesvalley:
You’re right, I put it too strongly.
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus:
If it’s any consolation, so did his creator. She is known to have referred to him as “insufferable … a detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep.”
CaseyL
I am so enjoying these comments!
I read both Christie and Sayers, and have to say I prefer Sayers, precisely because her world seems wider and more interesting; and her characters tend not, IIRC, to be stereotypes. Christie’s characters seemed to me to be very stereotypical. I’ve re-read my favorites Sayers a few times; can’t recall ever re-reading a Christie.
The devastation of the Great War, followed by the flu epidemic and the Great Depression, really can’t be overstated in terms of how it affected Europe’s reaction to Hitler’s rise. They had been through three decades of honest-to-god Hell, lost a substantial proportion of their young men, and simply did not want to have to face the idea of doing it all over again.
When I see how modern society reacts to traumas that are far less acute and long-lasting (i.e, very badly), I don’t see that we have much cause to criticize that lack of response. (In fact, we do seem to be part of that era all over again, though clearly European and US response to Putin’s war on Ukraine is much better than I thought possible)
Timill
@tokyocali (formerly tokyo ex-pat):
Ah, yes. The only book I have literally thrown across a room was the second of Laurie R King’s series, when Our Hero counts out (approx) 2 pennies, 3 ha’pennies and 6 farthings and declares it to be a shilling. What about the other sevenpence, guv?
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@kalakal: Austin did ignore the French Revolution, though, and seems to treat any mention of war as if it were a business opportunity.
kalakal
@Chacal Charles Calthrop:
That was really the point of my remark. I don’t think there is any mention of the suffering caused by it. She didn’t ignore the wars but any reference to them is indirect. The militia are important in Pride and Prejudice but Austen never mentions why they turn up in the first place. She didn’t have to, as Wolvesvalley said, her audience knew why.
It’s one of the problems for modern writers doing historical fiction, they have to explain stuff for us which the people of the period in question knew without having to be told.
Catnaz
Splitting Image
@Chacal Charles Calthrop:
Austen wrote almost exclusively from a female character’s point of view, though. I don’t think she ever wrote a male character saying something to another man without a woman present, on the grounds that Austen herself had no idea how men talked to each other when women weren’t around. (All of her books would fail a reverse-Bechdel test.)
You don’t even get to see Bingley or Darcy ask Mr. Bennett for permission to marry Jane and Elizabeth, on the grounds that the girls themselves would not have been privy to those conversations. All you get to see is Elizabeth waiting outside the room for them to finish talking and her father telling her how the conversation went.
Consequently you don’t really hear much about anything that the men of the time wouldn’t have wanted their women to worry their pretty little heads about. War and business being two of those things.
Wolvesvalley
@Splitting Image: @Catnaz:
Murder Must Advertise was the first Sayers mystery I ever read — just picked it up in the library without having heard of her. I was hooked.
The convulsion in the ad agency (a hilarious chapter) that messed up the crime scheme wasn’t a typo but an editor catching an unfortunate pairing of headline and illustration. Sayers laid the groundwork for it five chapters earlier, in which Lord Peter learned, among other things, “that if, by the most farfetched stretch of ingenuity, an indecent meaning could be read into a headline, that was the meaning that the great British Public would infallibly read into it.”
PaulB
I think there was, but it was more about veterans returning home who had excelled in the military but were ill-suited to anything in civilian life. Bryan Eastley in “4:50 From Paddington” comes to mind.
I always did wonder if it was he who got the girl in the end.
karen marie
@Princess: Librivox has Vera Brittain’s “Verses of a V. A. D.” Audible has “Testament of Youth.” I’d not heard of her before but the short synopsis has me sold.
Thanks!
karen marie
@kalakal: It just occurs to me that PG Wodehouse completely ignored war.
Baby Cat is now chewing on the monitor. Time to stop sitting at the computer!
Betsy
@kalakal: Near the outset of Persuasion, Captain Wentworth has made his fortune in the Napoleonic wars, which made him such a catch … it isn’t explicitly stated *what* war, but would have been obvious to a contemporary reader.
karen marie
@kalakal: His book “The Cruel Sea” is up on youtube.
So many books, so little time!
Tehanu
But Sayers didn’t “find it perfectly OK.” Peter doesn’t approve of how George is behaving to Sheila, although he does try to cut George a little slack because of his war trauma. At the end it’s clear that George, having been cleared of the murder charge, will now be able to get some help to behave better.
Me too! Glad I’m not the only one.