Dorothy L. Sayers

Somerville College, Oxford, where Sayers studied and gained the inspiration for her novel Gaudy Night

Sayers, an only child, was born on 13 June 1893 at the Headmaster's House on Brewer Street in Oxford. She was the daughter of Helen Mary Leigh and her husband, the Rev. Henry Sayers. Her mother was a daughter of Frederick Leigh, a solicitor whose family roots were in the landed gentry in the Isle of Wight, and had herself been born at "The Chestnuts", Millbrook, Hampshire. Her father, originally from Littlehampton, West Sussex, was a chaplain of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and headmaster of Christ Church Cathedral School.[3]

When Sayers was six, her father started teaching her Latin.[4] She grew up in the tiny village of Bluntisham in Huntingdonshire after her father was given the living there as rector of Bluntisham-cum-Earith. The church graveyard next to the elegant Regency-style rectory features the surnames of several characters from her mystery The Nine Tailors. She was inspired by her father's restoration of the Bluntisham church bells in 1910.[5] The nearby River Great Ouse and the Fens invite comparison with the book's vivid description of a massive flood around the village.[6]

From 1909 Sayers was educated at the Godolphin School,[7] a boarding school in Salisbury. Her father later moved to the living of Christchurch, in Cambridgeshire.

In 1912, Sayers received the Gilchrist Scholarship for Modern Languages to Somerville College, Oxford[8][9] where she studied modern languages and medieval literature and was taught by Mildred Pope. She graduated with first-class honours in 1915.[10] Women were not awarded degrees at that time, but Sayers was among the first to receive a degree when the position changed a few years later;[11] in 1920 she graduated as an MA. Her experience of Oxford academic life eventually inspired her penultimate Peter Wimsey novel, Gaudy Night.

Sayers's first book of poetry was published in 1916 as OP. I[12] by Blackwell Publishing in Oxford. Her second book of poems, "Catholic Tales and Christian Songs", was published in 1918, also by Blackwell. Later, Sayers worked for Blackwell's and then as a teacher in several locations, including Normandy, France. She also published a number of poems in the Oxford Magazine.[13] In 1920 Sayers contributed two poems, one of them a love poem named Veronica to the first and only issue of The Quorum, the UK's first homosexual magazine.[14]

In the early 1920s she worked for the publisher Victor Gollancz. One of the writers she dealt with was A. M. Burrage, who knew her husband and with whom she corresponded on friendly terms.[15]

Sayers's longest employment was from 1922 to 1931 as a copywriter at S.H. Benson's advertising agency, located at International Buildings, Kingsway, London. A colleague of hers at the agency was Albert Henry Ross (1881–1950) who is better known by his literary pseudonym Frank Morison. He wrote the best-selling Christian apologetics book Who Moved the Stone? which explored the historicity of the trial, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Sayers later relied on his book when she composed the trial scene of Jesus in her play The Man Born to Be King.[16]

As an advertiser, Sayers's collaboration with artist John Gilroy resulted in "The Mustard Club" for Colman's Mustard and the Guinness "Zoo" advertisements, variations of which still appear today. One example was the Toucan, his bill arching under a glass of Guinness, with Sayers's jingle:[17]

If he can say as you can
Guinness is good for you
How grand to be a Toucan
Just think what Toucan do

Sayers is also credited with coining the slogan "It pays to advertise!"[18][19] She used the advertising industry as the setting of Murder Must Advertise, where she describes the role of truth in advertising:

... the firm of Pym's Publicity, Ltd., Advertising Agents ...

"Now, Mr. Pym is a man of rigid morality—except, of course, as regards his profession, whose essence is to tell plausible lies for money—"

"How about truth in advertising?"

"Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There's yeast in bread, but you can't make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising ... is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas, with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentation into a form that the public can swallow."[18]

Sayers began working out the plot of her first novel some time in 1920–21. The seeds of the plot for Whose Body? can be seen in a letter that Sayers wrote on 22 January 1921:[20]

My detective story begins brightly, with a fat lady found dead in her bath with nothing on but her pince-nez. Now why did she wear pince-nez in her bath? If you can guess, you will be in a position to lay hands upon the murderer, but he's a very cool and cunning fellow ...

— Barbara Reynolds, The Passionate Intellect Dorothy L. Sayers' Encounter with Dante, p. 101

The victim was changed to a man in the final version.

Lord Peter Wimsey featured in eleven novels and two sets of short stories. Sayers once commented that Lord Peter was a mixture of Fred Astaire and Bertie Wooster. Sayers introduced the character of detective novelist Harriet Vane in Strong Poison. She remarked more than once that she had developed the "husky voiced, dark-eyed" Harriet to put an end to Lord Peter via matrimony. But in the course of writing Gaudy Night, Sayers imbued Lord Peter and Harriet with so much life that she was never able, as she put it, to "see Lord Peter exit the stage".[21]

She co-wrote with Robert Eustace one murder mystery that did not feature Wimsey, The Documents in the Case, and wrote a portion of three other mysteries with several members of the Detection Club.

Sayers's detective stories explored the trauma of World War I veterans in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, discussed the ethics of advertising in Murder Must Advertise, and advocated women's education (then a controversial subject) and role in society in Gaudy Night. In Gaudy Night, Miss Barton writes a book attacking the Nazi doctrine of Kinder, Küche, Kirche, which restricted women's roles to family activities, and in many ways the novel can be read as an attack on Nazi social doctrine. It has been described as "the first feminist mystery novel."[22] Sayers's Christian and academic experiences are themes in her detective series.

Sayers also wrote eleven short stories about Montague Egg, a wine and spirits salesman who solves mysteries. Six of these appear in her collection Hangman's Holiday (1933), the remaining five in In the Teeth of the Evidence (1939).

Sayers herself considered her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy to be her best work. Hell appeared in 1949, as one of the then-recently introduced series of Penguin Classics. Purgatory followed in 1955. The third volume (Paradise) was unfinished at her death, and was completed by Barbara Reynolds in 1962.

Sayers's translation preserves the original Italian terza rima rhyme scheme. The line usually rendered "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" turns, in the Sayers translation, into "Lay down all hope, you who go in by me," so that her "go in by me" rhymes with "made to be" two lines earlier, and "unsearchably" two lines before that. The Italian reads "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate", and both the traditional rendering and Sayers's translation add to the source text in an effort to preserve the original length: "here" is added in the traditional, and "by me" in Sayers. Also, the addition of "by me" draws from the previous lines of the canto: "Per me si va ne la città dolente;/ per me si va ne l'etterno dolore;/ per me si va tra la perduta gente." (Longfellow: "Through me the way is to the city dolent;/ through me the way is to the eternal dole;/ through me the way is to the people lost.") Umberto Eco, in his book Mouse or Rat? suggests that, of the various English translations, Sayers "does the best in at least partially preserving the hendecasyllables and the rhyme."[23]

Sayers's translation of the Divine Comedy includes extensive notes at the end of each canto,[24][25][26] explaining the theological meaning of what she calls "a great Christian allegory."[27] Her translation has remained popular: in spite of publishing new translations by Mark Musa and Robin Kirkpatrick, as of 2009 Penguin Books was still publishing the Sayers edition.[28][29][30]

In the introduction to her translation of The Song of Roland, Sayers expressed an outspoken feeling of attraction and love for:

"... That new-washed world of clear sun and glittering colour which we call the Middle Age (as though it were middle-aged) but which has perhaps a better right than the blown rose of the Renaissance to be called the Age of Re-birth".

She praised Roland for being a purely Christian myth, in contrast to such epics as Beowulf in which she found a strong pagan content.

She shared an enthusiasm for Dante's work with the novelist, poet, playwright and lay-theologian Charles Williams (1886-1945) and she contributed an essay about The Divine Comedy to the memorial volume Essays Presented to Charles Williams.[31]

Sayers's religious book The Mind of the Maker (1941) explores at length the analogy between a human creator (especially a writer of novels and plays) and the doctrine of the Trinity in creation. She suggests that any human creation of significance involves the Idea, the Energy (roughly: the process of writing and that actual 'incarnation' as a material object), and the Power (roughly: the process of reading and hearing and the effect that it has on the audience). She draws analogies between this "trinity" and the theological Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The book contains examples drawn from her own experiences as a writer, as well as criticisms of writers who exhibit, in her view, an inadequate balance of Idea, Energy, and Power.[32] She strongly defends the view that literary creatures have a nature of their own, vehemently replying to a well-wisher who wanted Wimsey to "end up a convinced Christian". "From what I know of him, nothing is more unlikely ... Peter is not the Ideal Man".[33]

Creed or Chaos? is a restatement of basic historical Christian doctrine, based on the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed, similar to but somewhat more densely written than C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. Both sought to explain the central doctrines of Christianity, clearly and concisely, to those who had encountered them in distorted or watered-down forms, on the grounds that, if you are going to criticise something, you had best know what it is first.

Her influential essay "The Lost Tools of Learning"[34] has been used by many schools in the US as a basis for the classical education movement, reviving the medieval trivium subjects (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) as tools to enable the analysis and mastery of every other subject. Sayers also wrote three volumes of commentaries about Dante, religious essays, and several plays, of which The Man Born to Be King may be the best known. The Just Vengeance, written for the 1946 Lichfield Festival and the 750th anniversary of Lichfield Cathedral, was produced in the cathedral with Elizabeth, the Queen Mother in the audience.[35]

The religious works of Sayers did so well at presenting the orthodox Anglican position that, in 1943, the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, offered her a Lambeth doctorate in divinity, which she declined, explaining that “I have only served Divinity, as it were, accidentally, coming to it as a writer rather than as a Christian person.” They had an extensive correspondence, in which Temple tried to persuade her to accept a DD, and Sayers said she would see no problem about accepting a doctorate of letters. Temple concluded that he would mention this to others.[36] In 1950, Sayers accepted an honorary degree of D. Litt. from the University of Durham.

Sayers refused to be identified as a feminist stating, "I am afraid—that I was not sure I wanted to 'identify myself,' as the phrase goes, with feminism, and that the time for 'feminism,' in the old-fashioned sense of the word, had gone past."[37] However, that did not prevent her from grappling with inequalities brought about from gender discrimination and responding to issues on women's rights. In her essay, Are Women Human?, an address she gave to a Women's Society in 1938, she writes in clarifying what feminism should be, considering how assertions such as, "a woman is as good as a man" or the tendency to "copy what men do", may in fact subvert the point an advocate of women's rights would want to prove in the first place. In the essay she concludes with this:

Indeed, it is my experience that both men and women are fundamentally human, and that there is very little mystery about either sex, except the exasperating mysteriousness of human beings in general...If you wish to preserve a free democracy, you must base it—not on classes and categories, for this will land you in the totalitarian State, where no one may act or think except as the member of a category. You must base it upon the individual Tom, Dick and Harry, on the individual Jack and Jill—in fact, upon you and me.[37]

Rather than discriminating between the differences of genders she believed that it is the recognition of our shared humanity as individual human beings upon which equality should be built.

Sayers continues to elaborate on the same argument in her other essay The Human-Not-Quite-Human in which she satirises existing gender stereotypes by flipping them around.[38]

Gaudy Night has been described as "the first feminist mystery novel."[22] It is a novel that extensively discusses feminist positions. Sayers distanced herself from feminist political labels, and preferred to be considered "simply human".[39] Crystal Downing notes that Sayers "refused to call herself a feminist, believing in practicing women's rights more than in preaching them."[40]

Nevertheless, a number of scholars have identified her as a feminist. Susan Haack calls her an "old-fashioned, humanistic, individualistic feminist."[41] Mo Moulton argues that Sayers "was not born a feminist; she became one, through bitter suffering and the stark realization of the precariousness of her position in a world which denied female sexuality in all sorts of ways."[42]

The poet W. H. Auden and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein were notable critics of her novels.[43][44] A savage attack on Sayers's writing ability came from the American critic Edmund Wilson, in a well-known 1945 article in The New Yorker called "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?"[45] He briefly writes about her novel The Nine Tailors, saying "I declare that it seems to me one of the dullest books I have ever encountered in any field." Wilson continues "I had often heard people say that Dorothy Sayers wrote well ... but, really, she does not write very well: it is simply that she is more consciously literary than most of the other detective-story writers and that she thus attracts attention in a field which is mostly on a sub-literary level."

The academic critic Q. D. Leavis criticises Sayers in more specific terms in a review of Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon, published in the critical journal Scrutiny, saying her fiction is "popular and romantic while pretending to realism."[46] Leavis argues that Sayers presents academic life as "sound and sincere because it is scholarly," a place of "invulnerable standards of taste charging the charmed atmosphere".[47] But, Leavis says, this is unrealistic: "If such a world ever existed, and I should be surprised to hear as much, it does no longer, and to give substance to a lie or to perpetuate a dead myth is to do no one any service really."[48] Leavis comments that "only best-seller novelists could have such illusions about human nature."[48]

The critic Sean Latham has defended Sayers, arguing that Wilson and Leavis simply objected to a detective story writer having pretensions beyond what they saw as her role of popular culture "hack".[43] Latham says that, in their eyes, "Sayers' primary crime lay in her attempt to transform the detective novel into something other than an ephemeral bit of popular culture".[43]

Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers's heroic detective, has been criticised as too perfect; over time, the various talents that he displays grow too numerous for some readers to swallow. Edmund Wilson expressed his distaste for Wimsey in his criticism of The Nine Tailors: "There was also a dreadful stock English nobleman of the casual and debonair kind, with the embarrassing name of Lord Peter Wimsey, and, although he was the focal character in the novel ... I had to skip a good deal of him, too."[45]

The character Harriet Vane, featured in four novels, has been criticised as a mere stand-in for the author. Many of the themes and settings of Sayers's novels, particularly those involving Vane, seem to reflect Sayers's own concerns and experiences.[49] Vane, like Sayers, was educated at Oxford (unusual for a woman at the time) and is a mystery writer. Vane initially meets Wimsey when she is tried for poisoning her lover (Strong Poison); he immediately falls for her and insists on participating in the defence preparations for her retrial; but she rejects him. In Have His Carcase, she collaborates with Wimsey to solve a murder but still rejects his proposals of marriage. She eventually accepts (Gaudy Night) and marries him (Busman's Honeymoon).

Biographers of Sayers have disagreed as to whether Sayers was anti-Semitic. In Sayers: A Biography,[50] James Brabazon argues that she was. This conclusion is supported by Carolyn G. Heilbrun in Dorothy L. Sayers: Biography Between the Lines,[51] who agrees with his assessment of anti-Semitism, but dissents from the excuses that he made for it. Robert Kuhn McGregor and Ethan Lewis argue in Conundrums for the Long Week-End that Sayers was not anti-Semitic but used popular British stereotypes of class and ethnicity. In 1936, a translator wanted "to soften the thrusts against the Jews" in Whose Body?; Sayers, surprised, replied that the only characters "treated in a favourable light were the Jews!"[52]

Sayers was part of The Mutual Admiration Society (MAS), a literary society of undergraduate women during her studies in Somerville College, Oxford, one of Oxford's first two women's colleges. The MAS was formed by Sayers in 1912 along with two other Somerville students, Amphilis Middlemore and Charis Ursula Barnett as a women's writing community to read and critique each other's works. Sayers named the group "Mutual Admiration Society", remarking, "if we didn't give ourselves that title, the rest of College would."[72] Prescott comments that, "The name was meant to be humorous, meant to soften its closed status, making its existence tolerable, even attractive, among students ... the MAS, by its very name, threw the ball back to those who looked upon women students at Oxford with hidden disdain or trepidation, aiming, with subtlety, that name toward male dominated Oxford."[73]

Together, the MAS made one unique volume of written work, titled The Blue Moon. This contained six pieces, three of which were poems written by Sayers.[74] Sayer's short story "Who Calls the Tune?" was also included.[75]

Such a community allowed its female members within the largely male oriented environment of Oxford to have a literary haven where they could provide each other with literary, social, professional, and personal support. Their influences on one another extended throughout their academic and personal lives and they continued to remain in contact for decades after their Oxford days through letters and visits to one another.

Including Sayers, there are a total of 9 documented members: Dorothy L. Sayers, Amphilis Middlemore, Charis Ursula Barnett, Muriel Jaeger, Margaret Amy Chubb, Marjorie Maud Barber, Muriel St. Clare Byrne, Dorothy Hanbury Rowe, and Catherine Hope Godfrey.[73] Prescott observes that this small society of undergraduate students in Oxford would come to produce "vibrant women, prolific authors, theatrical figures, social activists, teachers, and scholars in their own right"[73] and that, "the women of the MAS shaped their lives, individually and collectively, as a testament to strength of purpose, not only with respect to their gender, but as fully invested members of humanity."[76]

Sayer's friendship with C. S. Lewis first began with a fan letter she had written in admiration of his Christian apologetic novel, The Screwtape Letters. Lewis later recounted, "[Sayers] was the first person of importance who ever wrote me a fan letter."[77] He expressed his reciprocal admiration in a responding letter, calling her The Man Born to be King a complete success, and continued to read the play cycle every Holy Week thereafter.[78] Their ongoing correspondence discussed their writing and academic interests, providing one another with criticisms, suggestions, and encouragement. Carol and Philip Zaleski note, “Sayers had much in common with Lewis and Tolkien’s circle, including a love of orthodox Christianity, traditional verse, popular fiction, and debate.”[79]

Though the two became friends under the circumstance of shared academic and theological interests, they had their disagreements regarding the movement towards the ordination of women in the Church of England.[80] Lewis, in opposition to the movement, had written to Sayers in request that she would also speak up against it. However Sayers, unable to see any theological reason against such an ordination, declined, writing back in a letter, "I fear you would find me rather an uneasy ally."[81]

Sayers comments on Lewis's views of women in another letter, stating, "I do admit that he is apt to write shocking nonsense about women and marriage. (That, however, is not because he is a bad theologian but because he is a rather frightened bachelor.)”[81]

Sayers was greatly influenced by G. K. Chesterton, fellow detective fiction novelist, essayist, critic, among other things, commenting that, "I think, in some ways, G.K.’s books have become more a part of my mental make-up than those of any writer you could name.”[82] She was familiar with Chesterton through his writings during her adolescent years and had attended his lectures in Oxford during her studies in Somerville. The two only became acquainted with one another as friends in 1917 when Sayers, a published author, approached Chesterton as mutual professionals.[83]

In the preface to Chesterton's play, The Surprise, Sayers writes,

To the young people of my generation, G.K.C. was a kind of Christian liberator. Like a beneficent bomb, he blew out of the Church a quantity of stained glass of a very poor period, and let in the gusts of fresh air in which the dead leaves of doctrine danced with all the energy and indecorum of Our Lady’s Tumbler.[84]