Into the Wardrobe

The divides in attitudes and styles are fascinating, but perhaps discussion of them is not working here. So now I'm trying to focus on material factual issues, instead of speculating about intentions and attitudes -- except those directly relevant to central factual issues. Still, the wisdom to tell the difference can be fun.

Just a disclaimer -- personally I find Hooper's style rather distasteful, and KL's almost unreadable (for reasons Stanley described).

But rather than use words about KL such as 'sly' (which implies intention), I'd rather say that her presentation of facts is unreliable because sometimes incomplete (eg re the 1976 Screwtape edition) or misleading (eg the partial Hooper quote that began this thread); and potentially important evidence seems to be excluded from her calculations (eg from Brown and Paxch).

As for Hooper's style, it may be a point of evidence against him as showing a tin ear (not so good for choosing the best variations of Lewis' poems etc) and possible lack of attention to detail (though after he's been criticized for this over the years, I'd think he'd now be making multiple checks, or that the estate would be doing some quality control, so his personal style may not be relevant to the estate's publications of the last few decades).

It may be a point of evidence for Hooper (or at least toward neutralizing an early KL forgery hoax charge) that he sometimes tends to colorful exaggeration and emotionalism; this to my mind can explain the mismatch of memory between him and Paxford about the 'bonfire' incident (or rather, Hooper's vivid and detailed memory vs Paxford's lack of memory). If Hooper never elsewhere used colorful imagery and possible exaggeration ('sat without moving', 'sitting a closed room for the last fourteen years compiling one book after another from a pile of scorched manuscripts.' etc) then a colorful and possibly exaggerated 'saved from bonfire' story would stick out suspiciously (and be a dangerous story for a forger to invent). But if that's the way he always talked and wrote, there's no reason to take that anecdote as evidence of some deep dark forgery plot, rather than that the ms were found among papers as Warnie was preparing to vacate the Kilns.