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AFTER MY OWN HEART: DOROTHY SAYERS' FEMINISM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2008

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Abstract

Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night, published in 1936, explores still-topical questions about the relation of epistemological and ethical values, and about the place of women in the life of the mind. In her wry reflections on the radical differences between today's feminist philosophy and Sayers' no-nonsense observation that “women are more like men than anything else on earth,” Susan Haack draws both on this detective story and on Sayers' wonderfully brisk essay, ‘Are Women Human?’

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Susan Haack. 2001

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References

Notes

1 Sayers, Dorothy L., Gaudy Night (1936: New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1995)Google Scholar. The passage quoted is from “the extempore prayer of an incoherent curate,” p.334. All subsequent page references in the text are to this edition.

2 Lurie, Alison, Imaginary Friends (1967: New York, Owl Books, Henry Holt and Company, 1998)Google Scholar.

3 Butler, Samuel, The Way of All Flesh (1903: New York: Random House, 1998)Google Scholar; see also Haack, SusanThe Ideal of Intellectual Integrity, in Life and Literature,’ New Literary History, 36.3, 2005: 359-73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Haack, Susan, ‘Concern for Truth: What It Means, Why It Matters,’ in The Flight from Science and Reason, eds. Gross, Paul R., Levitt, Norman, and Lewis, Martin W., Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 775 (1996): 57-62Google Scholar; reprinted in a book of the same title (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 57-62.

5 Snow, C. P., The Search (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934)Google Scholar.

6 Sayers, Dorothy L., ‘Are Women Human?’ (1938), and ‘The Human-Not-Quite-Human’ (undated), in Sayers, Unpopular Opinions: Twenty-One Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1947), 129-41 and 142-49Google Scholar.

7 Sayers, ‘Are Women Human?’ (n.6), pp.138-9.

8 Sayers, ‘The Human-Not-Quite-Human’ (n.6), p.142.

9 Sayers, ‘Are Women Human?’ (n.6), p.129.

10 Sayers, ‘Are Women Human?’ (n.6), p.138.

11 Sayers, ‘Are Women Human?’ (n.6), p.137.

12 Sayers, ‘Are Women Human?’ (n.6), p.131.

13 Sayers, ‘Aristotle on Detective Fiction,’ in Unpopular Opinions (n.6 above), 222-36.

14 I was presenting ‘The best man for the job may be a woman … and other alien thoughts on affirmative action in the academy,’ subsequently published in Haack, , Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 167-87Google Scholar, at NYU Law School, where Habermas was then visiting.

15 Sayers, ‘Are Women Human?’ (n.6), p.141.

16 Reported by Bell, E. T. in The Development of Mathematics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949), p.519Google Scholar.

17 Einstein, Albert, ‘On Classical Literature’ (1952), reprinted in Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein, ed. Selig, Carl, trans. Bargmann, Sonja (New York: Crown Publishers, 1954), 64-65Google Scholar.