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| Daphne - BBC2 Saturday 12th May 2007; Lesbian content drama with Janet McTeer | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: May 12 2007, 10:09 AM (2,280 Views) | |
| abzug | Nov 26 2007, 08:07 PM Post #46 |
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In love with a prisoner
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Didn't catch this one, but I relished every one of her scenes in the HBO miniseries "Five Days"--she is just beyond sexy, that one. Omigod, I just had a casting idea. Janet McTeer as the matriarch in the film adaptation of "When We Were Bad"--Charlotte Mendelsohn's new novel. It's not a lesbian character, but the mother is this high-powered famous English rabbi, who the world (and her family) just adores. McTeer would be perfect. |
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| solitasolano | Nov 27 2007, 01:28 AM Post #47 |
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abzug, I read the Foster biography a whiles ago, made some notes, scanned the Ellen Doubleday photo to post, then got chained to my bench at work. I might have my notes still at home, don't recall, but since you're reading the biography comment on some things I remember without my cliff notes. 1) The biography reprints large sections of correspondence and letters. I was intriqued how much of the actual dialog in the film was gleamed form letters and correspondence written between Daphne and Ellen Doubleday...didn't you LOVE how Ellen Doubleday kept CARBON COPIES of her correspondence...OMF what a different world. I think DuMauier destoryed her letters, but after Doubleday's death, her letters were made available. 2) Daphne's DuMauier's children did not know the nature of their mom's relationship with Lawrence until Doubleday's letters were public. 3) The biography is not exactly circumspect about the nature of the relationship, but certainly spends much much much more time on Daphne's heterosexual affairs....Case in point, Dahnpe's trip to Florida with Gertie was one paragraph long. There's a long letter reprinted at the end of the biography, I think like an appendix, can't recall. This letter from D to E refers to D's affair with Gertude. Besides these two entries, I found the biography to include little indication Daphne had an affair with Gertude. 4) The biography did a very good job demonstrating that Daphne's life was writing. Earlier in this thread we talked about the balance in her life between relationships and her art/writing. The bio makes the case that Daphne was consumed with her career and writing. 5) Oh yeah, and she was really into sailing. |
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| abzug | Nov 27 2007, 03:53 AM Post #48 |
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In love with a prisoner
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Wow, did you think so? I thought it was just as detailed about her affair with Gertrude as it was about her affair with any of the men she slept with. Any lack of specific details seemed to me to be due to a lack of correspondence about it. She didn't correspond with Gertrude, and the only person she would tell about a lesbian affair would have been Ellen. But Forster spends an incredible amount of time focusing on Daphne's grief after Gertrude's death, and talks about how Gertrude was the only person with whom she could be her whole, integrated self. So I didn't feel like she swept the affair under the carpet, or anything like that. To me it felt like she made it as explicit as she could, given the source material she had on hand.
Totally--it was so cool to read the book and hear the voices from the film. And yes, to think of an era when people really poured their hearts out into their writing. By hand. Meanwhile my 8 year old niece wrote me an actual letter and now it's taking me days to write her back, and all I keep thinking is "Why doesn't this kid have an email address?" |
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| solitasolano | Nov 27 2007, 07:20 AM Post #49 |
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I know we read the same book but I again will say Forster was much less specific about the affair and physical relationship between Lawrence and DuMaurier than say her relationship with Carol Reed (a guy for those of you who might be reading along and not recognize the name). I missed the balance of having reproduced correspondence between L and D, but as you point out, there wasn't any. The details of the Carol affair were not based soley on letters. They were referred to in the book as a couple. Gertie and Daphne were not (exception is the appendix letter to Ellen I mentioned.) I searched and reread the index entries for Lawrence to see if I missed something. I agree with your statement, "To me it felt like she made it as explicit as she could, given the source material she had on hand." Granted the source material was not much, yet again it didn't keep Forster from going on and on about Reed and say Daphne's much older cousin. I think it is significant that Daphne's children did not know the extent of the relationship until after Daphne died and Ellen Doubleday's letters were available. While looking for Carol Reed's full name I found a good article about a long lost very early DuMaurier short story. Referring to interviews with her kids and referencing the Forster biography, the aritcle calls her relationship with Lawrence "a brief filing" "Daphne was good at pretending. Her father had wanted a boy and, as a child, she wore boy’s clothes. Men seemed to have all the adventures. Her sisters both turned out to be gay, and in the 1950s Daphne herself fell in love with Ellen Doubleday, her American publisher, and had a brief fling with the actress Gertrude Lawrence." The weight import of Gertrude being the only person with who Daphne could be her whole, intergrated self was lost on me I guess. Again Forster paints Daphne as someone into her work and writing, interpersonal relations, except her children, were secondary. ETA: To ramble on, I thought the depliction of the relationshp between Daphne and her early school teacher she was quite smitten with and continued to write to (forgot her name) was more drawn out as a lesbian relationship, at least in terms of attachment and emotional dependency (I mean that as it sounds in not the best way.) We haven't mentioned Daphne's father's dislike of homosexuals. This is mentioned a handful of times in the book. I don't remember Forster mentioning that Daphne's two sisters were lesbians. Her older sister was a writter also, and younger sister a painter. Go to pages 59 and 60 here. |
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| abzug | Nov 27 2007, 03:14 PM Post #50 |
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In love with a prisoner
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I'm reading the last section of the book right now, and have been keeping your comments in mind as I read. I'm noticing that Lawrence is actually mentioned quite frequently--I suspect the index doesn't truly reflect the number of times she's mentioned. In particular, Forster repeatedly talks about how Daphne's inability to write fiction in her later years meant that she had absolutely no replacement in her life for Lawrence's death. Sorry, I didn't put that well. Let me try again: Forster depicts Lawrence as being the only person who ever truly fulfilled Daphne, emotionally-speaking, who allowed Daphne's full self a full expression. Daphne's fiction writing was the only other channel of fulfillment, and by the mid 1950s, she wasn't really able to write anymore the way she had formerly. So, nothing to replace the void left by Lawrence.
The cousin hasn't been mentioned since the early section of the book, and yes, Reed gets lots of mentions, but that's because he remained a part of Daphne's life (purely platonically) for many decades. In the section I'm reading now, he's hired her son to work on some of his films. So it's natural that he is mentioned so frequently. I think the trouble is that Daphne actually wrote about specific liaisons with certain men (the older cousin, Reed, Puxley or whatever his name was--the wartime affair), so Forster could actually describe specific interactions. But I don't think she described any of those relationships in a particularly romantic way. Her descriptions of Lawrence and Ellen Doubleday lacked some of the specific details, but on an emotional level they felt just as rich to me. It would be tough for Gertrude Lawrence and Daphne to be described as a couple in the same way that Carol Reed and Daphne were, simply because in this era it was very rare for a woman to be that sort of partner with another woman. Daphne, for all her crushes on women, wasn't Gertrude Stein. So no one can ever know, truly, how serious her relationship with Lawrence was--she hid it, as most women in the 1940s and 1950s would have. That's why one article might describe it as a "fling" while Forster depicts it more like the one True Love Affair of Daphne's life, even if she can't describe every tiny detail and maybe doesn't spend as many pages on it as we'd like. |
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8:49 AM Jul 11