Jean Starobinski

Insights Could the Starobinski Collection be hiding part of Sayers’s personal library?

A large library is formed from a variety of sources: gifts, hand-me-downs, required reading for the undergraduate and research acquisitions by the professor, second-hand finds on a stroll through the city and on the shelves of antique booksellers…Among the works thus acquired, researchers sometimes stumble upon a dispersed but coherent sub-collection.

Jean Starobinski was careful to retain the origin of his books. Far from removing the name of a previous owner, he sometimes indicated the book’s origin himself, as is the case with several books formerly in the possession of the British author Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957). Sayers was an unusual woman of letters. Following a degree in philology at Oxford, she acquired fame and fortune for her detective fiction. In spite of her critics, she managed to refresh and enrich the genre through her learning, allusions to social issues and bold characters such as Lord Wimsey. Having achieved financial security, Sayers turned to her passion for medieval literature – her translations included the Song of Roland and The Divine Comedy – and produced several essays and plays on religious themes.

The Starobinski Collection currently numbers four volumes from Sayers’s library (see references in the attached PDF document). Three are indicated in notes by Starobinski as having belonged to Sayers. The fourth, the Roman Vergil by the Latin scholar William F. J. Knight, bears Sayers’s signature on the flyleaf, and in addition to various annotations features a hand-written English translation of Horace’s Ode 22.

«Where did these books come from?» wonders Jean Starobinski in an email dated 9 March 2012, «Who did they belong to? A mystery. Perhaps a descendant or a relative who lived in the Geneva area. At least that’s what I told myself.» A regular visitor to the Plainpalais flea market, where he probably bought the book, Starobinski adds «I had read a few [of Sayers’s crime novels] and I discovered in these works a wealth of scholarly learning.»

In his preface to the translated «Anatomy of Melancholy» by Robert Burton (ed. J. Corti, 2000), Starobinski mentions another copy annotated by Sayers that is not catalogued in the collection in Bern, «Burton’s work was an immediate success with booksellers. [...] I came by chance to own the volumes that belonged to Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957), author of detective stories and translator of Dante; she had underlined many passages…».

Could this be an indication of similar discoveries to come in the cataloguing of the collection?

This is an article from the series «Insights» by the Swiss Literary Archives SLA. Translated by Anja Hälg. Check back here to see further trouvailles from the archive which are approved by the SLA and the authors. Most recent piece: Remo Fasani (in german and italian).