I'm not sure how one would research the question, even, but it does occur to me that Mary Renault uses "friend" and "lover" almost interchangeably in The Last of the Wine, set in ancient Athens where the characters have no reason to use a euphemism... so perhaps this was a usage she was familiar with, although one that had fallen out of fashion by the time she wrote the book?
Renault uses the English words interchangeably in part because they are the same word in classical Greek: φίλος means a loved one and is therefore used for family, friends, lovers, spouses, social intimates, it's a multivalent word. When people call one another "my dear" in classical Renault, they are almost certainly saying φίλε, "my dear one." (I had a professor who used to translate φίλοι inclusively as "near and dear," which I always liked.) Latin has a similar relationship between its verb for "love," amo, and its noun for "friend," amicus. English now has the two different words, but if we go far enough back in the Indo-European DNA, I'm willing to bet it didn't. In any case, it clearly inherited the sense of overlap even after the terminology diverged; to get back to Renault, I also imagine she is evoking some contemporary gay culture, about which she felt ambivalently, but it's still vibing there in her ancient Athens. Honestly, I don't think the non-platonic valence of "friend" has died out entirely in the twenty-first century. It remains ambiguous, and ambiguity is useful to people.
My impression (admittedly I am not deeply versed in Sayers biography) was that Sayers was strictly heterosexual, but then, many biographers struggle to deal with sexual fluidity in their subjects...
Yeah. I have never read that she had any known romantic or sexual relationships with women, but then I also had no idea about The Quorum or "Veronica."
Anyway, clearly she had witnessed these affairs with enough interest and sympathy to write a poem from the point of view of a participant, whether or not she was ever part of one.
She had queer friends; that's known. She co-wrote the original 1936 stage play of Busman's Honeymoon with Muriel St. Clare Byrne, who had been a close friend since the undergraduate days of the Mutual Admiration Society and was openly lesbian. I really do wonder if at least once she got burned. That bitterness about dead sea apples reads less convincingly as a strictly external observation when she knew someone with an honest-to-God life partner.
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Date: 2021-08-09 05:06 pm (UTC)Renault uses the English words interchangeably in part because they are the same word in classical Greek: φίλος means a loved one and is therefore used for family, friends, lovers, spouses, social intimates, it's a multivalent word. When people call one another "my dear" in classical Renault, they are almost certainly saying φίλε, "my dear one." (I had a professor who used to translate φίλοι inclusively as "near and dear," which I always liked.) Latin has a similar relationship between its verb for "love," amo, and its noun for "friend," amicus. English now has the two different words, but if we go far enough back in the Indo-European DNA, I'm willing to bet it didn't. In any case, it clearly inherited the sense of overlap even after the terminology diverged; to get back to Renault, I also imagine she is evoking some contemporary gay culture, about which she felt ambivalently, but it's still vibing there in her ancient Athens. Honestly, I don't think the non-platonic valence of "friend" has died out entirely in the twenty-first century. It remains ambiguous, and ambiguity is useful to people.
My impression (admittedly I am not deeply versed in Sayers biography) was that Sayers was strictly heterosexual, but then, many biographers struggle to deal with sexual fluidity in their subjects...
Yeah. I have never read that she had any known romantic or sexual relationships with women, but then I also had no idea about The Quorum or "Veronica."
Anyway, clearly she had witnessed these affairs with enough interest and sympathy to write a poem from the point of view of a participant, whether or not she was ever part of one.
She had queer friends; that's known. She co-wrote the original 1936 stage play of Busman's Honeymoon with Muriel St. Clare Byrne, who had been a close friend since the undergraduate days of the Mutual Admiration Society and was openly lesbian. I really do wonder if at least once she got burned. That bitterness about dead sea apples reads less convincingly as a strictly external observation when she knew someone with an honest-to-God life partner.