Dorothy L. Sayers – A Mind in Love

By Charlotte Ostermann

 

        From Victorian to post-war England; from sheltered only child to woman of the world; from advertising to apologetics; from fairy stories to the greatest story ever told – Dorothy L. Sayers in one personality, in one story, is an almost-larger-than-life aggregation of experiences and qualities.  To extract a précis, or an outline from the rich complexity of her life is, of course, to do her an injustice.  But to miss a chance to introduce her would be worse!

        Born in 1893 to an Anglican parson and his wife, Dorothy enjoyed an uneventful, middle class country life.  Home educated (and later to influence the modern homeschooling movement through her essay “The Lost Tools of Learning”) in Latin, French, German, violin and piano, she was a precocious student with an only child’s facility for imagination.  Immersed in Grimm’s fairy tales, Uncle Remus, the works of Lewis Carroll and tales of knights and ladies, she showed an early flair for drama and storytelling.  When, at age 16, she left home for college preparation at a boarding school, her interests in dancing, acting, choir, orchestra, photography, poetry and writing blossomed in spite of the rigorous academic program.  Her youthful letters are lively, witty, and full of a voice one can hear in her correspondence all through her sixty-four years.  Her physical energy and delight in playing the male leads in family and school plays is reminiscent of Jo in “Little Women”.  They would have been great pals.

        In 1912 Dorothy won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford.  Described by a classmate as “a bouncing and exuberant young female who always seemed to be preparing for tea parties”, she did a lot more than throw tea parties!  Singing in the Bach choir, shopping for new clothes, flirting and dancing with college boys, rowing for the team, attending Gilbert and Sullivan operas, writing weekly letters home, and sharing her literary talents with a Mutual Admiration Society of friends kept her life a whirl.  All the activity didn’t stop her from achieving First Class honors and receiving (years later, when the first female graduates’ degrees were actually conferred) a Master of Arts in Medieval French.  Tall, slim, with dark brown hair and blue eyes, Dorothy was a handsome, attractive, if not classically beautiful girl.  After graduation, she dabbled in teaching, learned the publishing trade through an apprenticeship, experienced unrequited love, published two volumes of poetry, and conceived her first detective story. 

        From 1923 to 1937, her ‘first wave’ of fame, Dorothy wrote twelve highly acclaimed novels and several short stories starring Lord Peter Wimsey.  No one since has eclipsed her as one of the foremost authors of detective fiction.  While a job in advertising paid the bills, Dorothy brought the detective story to new heights of sophistication and excellence.  Her introduction to the Golancz anthology of detective fiction is itself considered a masterpiece – a synthesis of the development and implicit rules of the genre.  Like G.K. Chesterton, whose ideas had influenced her, she thought of the detective story as a very particular kind of puzzle – a game played between author, characters, and readers.  She played the game with masterful attention to detail and authenticity, believing that “accuracy predisposes the reader to accept the incredible”.  She sprinkled her fiction with bits of her life, her reading, her family, her activities, and the current events of her time.  She had fun with Lord Peter – giving him riches, personal freedom, and a rare book collection she could only dream of.  The motto on his coat of arms – As my whimsy takes me – might have been her own. 

        Her novels gave her an outlet for working through her personal issues by objectifying herself in the character of Harriet Vane.  Soon after her graduation, she had had the heartbreaking experience of rejection by a man she deeply loved.  On the rebound from his callous desire to use her sexually without the commitment of marriage, Dorothy hardened her heart to use, in her turn, the next man she met who expected no strings attached.  He abandoned her when she became pregnant and she was left to fend for herself.  An older cousin, experienced in foster care, was willing to take in the child and keep Dorothy’s awful secret from her parents, whose hearts she was sure the news would break.  Somehow she managed to hide her pregnant figure under loose garments and John Anthony’s birth under the pretext of a long illness and convalescence.  Two years later, she met and married Mac Fleming, who was willing to adopt and support John, though the boy continued to live with Cousin Ivy until going off to boarding school. 

        Fans would later feel scandalized by the revelation that Dorothy’s adopted son was actually the fruit of her sinful liaison, but she herself had asked for and received God’s forgiveness, given life instead of aborting, and knocked herself out to provide financial support and a good home for the baby, so she felt she had done what she could to atone.  Harriet Vane, in “Strong Poison”, counts the cost of “free love” and begins the movement from brokenness toward wholeness that Dorothy experienced in the course of the next few years as she continued the Vane-Wimsey relationship in “Have His Carcase” and “Gaudy Night”.  By the end of 1929 she was financially able to leave her work making witty slogans and promotional campaigns at Benson’s agency.  Four years later, in “Murder Must Advertise”, she spun her experiences into a murder mystery full of the details and humor of life in the ad business. 

        Never one to have only one plate spinning, Dorothy worked during the ‘Wimsey years’ on a biography of Wilkie Collins, a translation of Tristan, an unfinished fictionalized autobiography, and, in 1936, a play for the annual Canterbury Cathedral Festival.  Recommended for the task by Charles Williams who, in 1934, had written a rave review of “The Nine Tailors”, Dorothy undertook to write “The Zeal of Thy House” – a dramatization of the story of the architect chosen to rebuild the Cathedral choir.  Williams had not been the only admirer of “Tailors”.  Readers and critics considered it her masterpiece of detective fiction.  The mystery turns upon the intricacies of nine-bell ringing patterns.  True to her standard of detailed accuracy, Dorothy made it her business to master ‘ringing the changes’.  The Oxford Companion to Music refers readers to her book for a lucid explanation of the art - written by one who had never touched a bell!

        Her work on the Canterbury play focused her thoughts upon the power of human creation to glorify God, the need in man to be creative to be fully human, and the danger of pride for man bearing and living out the image of the Creator.  During the war years, as she pondered what was needful in the restoration of the war-torn world, Dorothy grew convinced that this creative capacity of man was essential to a remaking of a Christian, humane society.  She saw the pattern of the Trinity stamped upon man himself, and then upon his own creative works and process – each created thing thus bearing, or having the potential to bear, to the world a message about the Trinitarian nature of God.  Through the lens of her own experience as author and dramatist, she could see this tri-part nature in her own work.  Her thoughts came together in 1941 as “The Mind of the Maker – (A Brief Study of the Creative Mind)”.  Coupled with her exploration, in “Creed or Chaos” (1940), of the necessity for and meaning of the Nicene Creed, “Mind of the Maker” established her reputation as an apologist and philosopher of the first rank.  Dorothy, while not feeling especially gifted at evangelism and considering herself less than qualified as a proper theologian, was fairly pressed into service for the next few years as a popular defender of the faith. 

In 1943, at fifty years old, she published a collection of radio dramas of the life of Christ which the BBC had commissioned.  “The Man Born to Be King” had stirred up some controversy as the play cycle began airing.  Written in modern, common idiom and portraying realistically the humanity of Christ, the stories offended and threatened the Protestant Truth Society and the Lord’s Day Observance Society, who mounted a heated campaign to have them banned or at least boycotted.  Championed by the Director of Religious Broadcasting, the series received an overwhelmingly positive response nation-wide.  Sayers’ biographer Barbara Reynolds calls it “…a great evangelistic undertaking, an unprecedented achievement in religious education and one which has never been equaled.”

By 1943, Dorothy and Charles Williams, linked through the Oxford ‘Inklings’ discussion group with C.S. Lewis, were good friends.  Williams’ book, “The Figure of Beatrice”, led Dorothy to read Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, which so captured her mind and heart that she spent the next fourteen years translating it from the Italian.  It seemed as though her entire being – her education, talents, experience, faith, and passionate appreciation for the work – was called to this work as to a mission.  She believed that Dante “has more to say to our present diseases than any editor of the Liberal-Humanist era could possibly foresee”.  Her translation, with its explanatory notes, brought Dante alive to millions of English-speaking readers.  In Dante, Dorothy saw the form of the well-developed intellect illuminated and filled by the light of spiritual passion – what Dante called “the mind in love”.  She died, in 1957, in the midst of the joy she found with this kindred spirit - the “Paradiso” to be finished later by Barbara Reynolds. Dorothy L. Sayers had said, “My proper job is making things with my imagination” and she was happiest when doing her ‘proper job’. 

 Her unexpected death recalled her youthful poem, “Hymn in Contemplation of Sudden Death”, in which she thanks God for the many, many blessings of her life so far.  It ends, prophetically, “I of my joy have had no dearth/ Though this night were my last on earth.”