Relation To Real Life
A section of the plot is autobiographical. The part about the Bohemian relationship between Harriet and Boyes was inspired by Dorothy L. Sayers' fraught relationship with fellow-author John Cournos. Cournos wanted her to ignore social mores and live with him without marriage, but she wanted to marry and have children. After a year of agony between 1921 and 1922, she learned that Cournos had claimed to be against marriage only to test her devotion, and she broke off with him.
Following this Sayers became involved in another relationship which resulted in an unwanted pregnancy. In 1924–25, in the period of her life following the delivery, Sayers wrote eleven letters to John Cournos about their unhappy relationship, her relationship with Bill White, and that with her son. The letters are now housed at Harvard University. Both Sayers and Cournos eventually fictionalized their experience: Sayers in Strong Poison, published in 1930, and Cournos in The Devil is an English Gentleman, published in 1932.
Read more about this topic: Strong Poison
Famous quotes containing the words relation to, relation, real and/or life:
“Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“To be a good enough parent one must be able to feel secure in one’s parenthood, and one’s relation to one’s child...The security of the parent about being a parent will eventually become the source of the child’s feeling secure about himself.”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)
“No ... the real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you—he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman.”
—Israel Zangwill (1864–1926)
“It is a momentous fact that a man may be good, or he may be bad; his life may be true, or it may be false; it may be either a shame or a glory to him. The good man builds himself up; the bad man destroys himself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)