Everything is better with a little Dame Rebecca

[oursin]

(And I am here trying to mollify a hissing peeve.)

Further to discussions apropos of a Certain Biographer and Not Doing the Research, and my recent post about inaccuracies that throw one out of the flow of a story:

I half-remembered a passage by my beloved Dame, and pinned it down to the essay on 'The Tosh Horse' and eventually managed to locate my copy of The Strange Necessity and find this bit about Marie Corelli -

When one turns over her pages one comes on delicious sentences -- such as the description of the bad man who made a reputation as a wit by dint of stealing a few salacious witticisms from Moliere and Baudelaire.... What a gallant try this Moliere-Baudelaire sentence is to do something with some hearsay story of vice wearing at times an iridescence, and of French authors writing wicked books!

Comments

[kore]

'Everything is better with a little Dame Rebecca'

That seriously needs to be a T-shirt.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Oh, true. Though you've gotta admit Rebecca West could be plenty inaccurate herself when she had a mind to be.

[wordweaverlynn]

Today I picked up a book by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child that mentioned old posters from the 1920s and 1930s, with their Art Deco lettering and their Gibson Girls. WTF?

Flappers by John Held Jr, sure. They were the slender, short-haired, flat-chested daughters of the voluptuously tressed, hourglass-curved Gibson Girls.