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[bdj] ‘I am a young woman. I have sex for money. And I love to write. This is my story…’ — BdJ wrote a five page article for the Sunday Telegraph Magazine …

quick scan of text from BdJ's Sunday Telegraph Magazine Article

» Don Foster in the Observer’s Letters: ‘Never have I said, either on or off the record, that Belle’s identity has been established by anything I ever said or contributed. I made perfectly clear, in a series of telephone conversations and email exchanges with the Times, of which I have a complete record, that Champion is a person of interest. Contrary to what the Times has reported, I do not believe that the search for Belle is over.’

» Sarah Champion’s Belle De Jour Page — links and scans of articles.

» “Belle de Jour” and literary forensics — more analysis of the text of BdJ. ‘…literary forensics is harder than it looks. It’s the practice of determining authorship from quirks, styles, idiosyncrasies, etc. I’ve played around with it, and been wrong. My speculations, which again, might certainly be wrong: 1) The “Belle de Jour” blog is a fake, written by at least two people, one starting it, then another taking over later. 2) At least the second person, the one who took over, is a journalist. I’m more certain of #1 than #2.’

» Belle De Jour: Diary of a London Call Girl by Anonymous at Amazon.co.uk.

Belle de Jour in the Sunday Telegraph

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 28th, 2004 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Belle de Jour.

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8 Comments

Can this be true – The Telegraph site is so exhaustive? Just phoned them and they say it should be – everything is! But they don’t have access to the database on Sundays and no-one can help until tomorrow morning at 9am! Technological era huh. Anyway, shooting down the newsagents now!

[posted by nick c at 4:30pm on Mar 28 2004]

Obsessed? Every other day is Belle de Jour day at LinkMachineGo.

Once the right-wing broadsheets begin covering this farce then isn’t it time to move on?

I love reading BdJ – I just don’t want to read ABOUT her as well.

[posted by Rob at 10:40am on Mar 29 2004]

Well don’t then Rob!

[posted by nick c at 12:00pm on Mar 29 2004]

The Telegraph piece is now online at: ‘I am a young woman. I have sex for money. And I love to write. This is my story…’

[posted by Phil at 2:49pm on Mar 29 2004]

“The usual classics: Bede, Ivanhoe”? Yeah, right.

Hilarious stuff.

There are quite a few dissonances, I think. I wouldn’t lump together Greer and Davis, for instance. I’d hardly describe Euripides as a “bedside standard” either.

Neither did Huxley write much “psychedelic scifi disguised as literature”. You’d never characterise him that way unless you had read nothing but Brave New World.

This article was not written by the blogger, I think. The scattergun literary boasting and a couple of idioms strike me as American. The blog is written by someone English.

[posted by Dr Zen at 5:35pm on Mar 30 2004]

Which idioms strike you as American? I am an American, and nothing seemed obviously so to me. In fact, it seemed very English (e.g. “bedsit”, “shtum”)

[posted by Seth Finkelstein at 9:00am on Mar 31 2004]

American idioms — the subjunctive in “Why, did other girls demand they only be assigned film stars?”, semicolons where we might not use them, “he never spoke to me again” instead of “he never talked to me again”, which is the common idiom here, choosing Angela Davis as her exemplar of feminist theory (nothing like as widely read here as in the States — at best BdJ has done a feminist theory course). Little things.

[posted by Dr Zen at 6:39pm on Apr 4 2004]

Hmm … Perhaps an English person who spent some time in America and picked up some of the phrases? (which would be consistent with Lisa Hilton)

[posted by Seth Finkelstein at 5:28pm on Apr 5 2004]

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