How finicky is too finicky?

[pameladean]

So I'm going over the scanned text of The Dubious Hills to catch errors and to confirm its correspondence with the originally published version. Early on, something reminds Arry of "one of Beldi's paintings." I had forgotten that Beldi ever painted anything, and was considering this in the light of the short stories (all striving to be novels,

Comments

[sovay]

a note from Harriet Vane to Philip Boyes is introduced into evidence, and the judge remarks, "It is signed simply, M."

That's great. Is it known if that's just a misprint or a fossil from an earlier draft?

[pameladean]

I have no idea. I first actually noticed it in the facsimile hardcover, which I was reading very carefully for the first time, though of course it was rereading of the actual book; and just assumed that it had been corrected in paperback editions later on. Then I became curious and checked. Nope, it's there all the time. I haven't made any kind of study of Sayers's manuscript history; I don't know if anybody else has either. I was so put off by the first biography and critical study of her that I read that I've pretty much been avoiding such things since.

P.

[kalimac]

Hoping this wasn't it, I thought the best study of Sayers I've read is the one by James Brabazon. It makes The Mind of the Maker sound considerably more interesting than it actually is, which makes me think that Brabazon is a posthumous re-incarnation of C.S. Lewis.

[pameladean]

Sadly, that was the one. I didn't mean that I thought it was worthless, though; just that his weird obsession with her appearance and weight was very offputting. I also felt that he got a number of minor aspects of the novels wrong, but can no longer recall which ones. I figured that his book probably really was one of the better ones, so I didn't want to read any more. My reaction may have been sharpened by having read a spectacularly uneven and in places just dreadful bio of Mary Renault at around the same time.

The Mind of the Maker is very strange. The first time I read it I was fascinated and wildly excited. I did not and do not believe in the entities that she was invoking, but as a means of organizing both the creative mind and the creative work I thought that her analysis was intellectually amazing and potentially very useful. I tried reading it again about ten years later and I couldn't, except for the passages in which she discusses her own work, which remained fascinating -- the discussion of the chess set in Gaudy

[kate_nepveu]

It's still in the most recent ebook edition.

(My health insurance card actually has my middle initial as M instead of H, because someone misread someone's handwriting, and I was told it would be too difficult to change.)