(no subject)

[flemmings]

I am very fond of Mrs. Bradley and would rather like to take her as a role model, but am increasingly going off Gladys Mitchell. She not only uses the n-word excessively (in a stock phrase, I grant you, that might not have struck an English person of the time as problematic), she really does deal in vulgar stereotypes. The Amos and Andy  'feets don't fail me now' trope that all black people are terrified of ghosts was bad enough, but seriously, had she ever met a single Jewish person? She manages to be worse than Sayers' 'all Jews are moneylenders or at best bankers', because at least Sayers doesn't make her characters croon about beautiful, beautiful money in pseudo-yiddish sentence structure.

Comments

[kore]

She manages to be worse than Sayers' 'all Jews are moneylenders or at best bankers', because at least Sayers doesn't make her characters croon about beautiful, beautiful money in pseudo-yiddish sentence structure.

GAH. Yeah, the in-the-water-table antisemitism of that generation was....yeah.

I know I've read at least a couple of her books but in the post-vax haze I can't remember which ones, argle.

[flemmings]

Agatha Christie gets an honourable mention from me because when Miss Marple meets a young man who seems indefinably different, maybe foreign? and then realizes he's Jewish, that's the end of it. She just gives him advice about his love life.

The anti-semitism is tiring indeed. I suppose I ought to be grateful that a writer includes characters that aren't all lily white Anglicans, but for chrissake. So did Conan Doyle, and he did it better.

Mitchell wrote so many books, it's no surprise you can't remember which.

[kore]

JE T'ADORE MARPLE. She is just the Best.