Dorothy L. Sayers
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Dorothy Leigh Sayers (Oxford, 13 June 1893 – Witham, 17 December 1957) was a renowned British author, translator, student of classical and modern languages, and Christian humanist.
Dorothy L. Sayers is perhaps best known for her Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries-a series of novels and short stories featuring an English aristocrat who solves numerous mysteries as an amateur sleuth. His love affair and ultimate marriage with Harriet Vane feature prominently throughout the series.
History and Personal Life
Sayers, who was an only child, was born in Oxford in 1893, where her father, the Rev. Henry Sayers, M.A., was chaplain of Christ Church, Oxford and headmaster of the Choir School (when she was six he started teaching her Latin). In 1912, she won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, studying modern languages and medieval literature, finishing with first-class honours in 1915. Although women could not be granted degrees at that time, Sayers was among the first to receive a degree when the situation changed a few years later, and in 1920 she earned an M. A. Her personal experience of Oxford academic life is evident in Gaudy Night.
Sayers subsequently worked for Blackwell Publishing in Oxford, as a teacher in Normandy, France, and from 1922-1931 as a copywriter at S. H. Benson's advertising agency in London. This gave her useful insight into the advertising industry, which is the setting of her mystery, Murder Must Advertise. She was quite successful as an advertiser, creating "The Mustard Club" for Colman's Mustard and being credited with coining the phrase "It pays to advertise."
\"Strictly Confidential. Particulars about Baby.\"
At age 29, Sayers fell in love with novelist John Cournos, the first intense love of her life. He wanted her to ignore social mores and live with him without marriage. She wanted to marry and have children. After a year of agony (1921-1922), she learned that Cournos had claimed to be against marriage only to test her devotion, and she broke off with him. (Art imitated life when she used this as a story line when she introduced Harriet Vane to Lord Peter Wimsey in "Strong Poison." See below.) Her heart broken, Sayers rebounded by becoming involved with Bill White, an unemployed motor car salesman. After a brief, intense, and mainly sexual relationship, Sayers discovered she was pregnant. White reacted badly, storming out "in rage & misery" when Sayers admitted her pregnancy.
Fearing the effect of her pregnancy on her parents, then in their 70s, Sayers opted to hide from friends and family. She continued to work at Benson's until the beginning of her last trimester, at which point she pleaded exhaustion and took an extended leave. She went alone to a "mothers' hospital" under an assumed name, and the child, John Anthony, was born January 3, 1924, at Southbourne, Hampshire. She remained with John for three weeks, nursing and caring for him.
Unable to return to her life or work with a child, Sayers arranged for the baby to be cared for by her cousin Ivy Shrimpton, who was successfully fostering other children at the time. She wrote to Ivy, telling her a sad story about "a friend" and asking Ivy to raise the child. When Ivy agreed, Sayers sent her another letter that began "Strictly Confidential: Particulars about Baby" which revealed the child's parentage and swore Shrimpton to silence. In 1924-1925, she wrote 11 letters to John Cournos about their unhappy relationship, her relationship with White, and her son. The letters are now housed at Harvard University.
Two years later, by which time she had published her first two detective novels, Sayers married Oswald Arthur "Mac" Fleming, a Scottish journalist whose professional name was "Atherton Fleming." He was divorced with two children, which in those days meant they could not have a church wedding. Despite this disappointment, her parents welcomed Mac into the fold.
The marriage began very happily, with a strong partnership at home. Both were working a great deal - Mac as an author and journalist, Dorothy as an advertising copywriter and author. Over time, Mac's health worsened (largely due to his WWI service), and he became unable to work, his income dwindling. Meanwhile, Dorothy's fame continued to grow, and he began to feel eclipsed.
Although he never lived with them, Dorothy and her husband unofficially adopted her son John when he was ten - until that time he had known her only as "Cousin Dorothy". While Sayers provided for his upbringing, she never publicly acknowledged him as her biological son. Given the times, perhaps this is not surprising. Mac died in 1950, John died in 1984 at age 60, Sayers herself died suddenly of a stroke in 1957 at the age of 64.
The Lady as a Writer
After going down from Oxford, Sayers struggled to find a place in the world. She began working out the plot of her first novel sometime in 1920 – 1921. The seeds of the plot for Whose Body? can be seen in a letter Sayers wrote on January 22, 1921:
- "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..." (p.101, Reynolds)
When she tired of writing pure detective stories, Sayers introduced detective novelist Harriet Vane in Strong Poison. Sayers 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 to, as she put it, "see Lord Peter exit the stage."
Sayers also wrote a number of short stories about Montague Egg, a wine salesman who solves mysteries.
The most savage attack on Sayers' writing ability came from the prominent American critic and man of letters Edmund Wilson in a well-known 1945 article in The New Yorker called Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? He briefly writes about her famous novel The Nine Tailors, saying "I set out to read [it] in the hope of tasting some novel excitement, and I declare that it seems to me one of the dullest books I have ever encountered in any field. The first part is all about bell-ringing as it is practised in English churches and contains a lot of information of the kind that you might expect to find in an encyclopedia article on campanology. I skipped a good deal of this, and found myself skipping, also, a large section of the conversations between conventional English village characters...." After a mention of the "awful whimsical patter of Lord Peter", Wilson then attacks Sayers' apparent strength: "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."
Turning Heart and Hands to God's Work
Sayers herself considered her translation of Dante's Divina Commedia to be her best work. Unfinished at her death, it was completed by Barbara Reynolds. She also wrote religious essays and plays, of which The Man Born to be King may be the best known.
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 color 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.
Her religious works did so well at presenting the orthodox Anglican position that in 1943 the Archbishop of Canterbury offered her a Lambeth doctorate in divinity, which she declined. In 1950, however, she accepted an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Durham.
Her essay [The Lost Tools of Learning] has been used by several schools in the US as a basis for a revival of classical education.
Sayers was a good friend of C. S. Lewis and several of the other Inklings. On some occasions, Sayers joined Lewis at meetings of the Socratic Club. Lewis said he read The Man Born to Be King every Easter, but he claimed to be unable to appreciate detective stories. J. R. R. Tolkien, however, read some of the Wimsey novels but scorned the later ones, such as Gaudy Night.
Criticism of Sayers
Criticism of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane
Wimsey has been criticized for being too perfect; Vane has been criticized for being a mere stand-in for the author. (See Mary Sue.) Edmund Wilson also expressed his distaste for Lord Peter 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."
Wimsey is rich, well-educated, charming, and brave, as well as an accomplished musician, an exceptional athlete, and a notable lover. His only flaws are a nervous disorder and a fear of responsibility, both originating from his service in World War I.
Vane, like Sayers, was educated at Oxford (unusual for a woman at the time) and is a mystery writer. Unlike Sayers, Vane is not a scholarly writer, but, in "Gaudy Night," she does help a professor work on a scholarly book as the ostensible reason for being on campus while she is actually investigating the mystery described in the book.
Anti-Semitism in Sayers' Writing
The portrayal of Jews in Sayers' fictional work has been criticized for being stereotypical and some of Sayers' characters express explicitly anti-semitic views. There is no evidence, however, that Sayers endorsed anti-semitism. The characters expressing such views were often employed to demonstrate the existence of anti-semitism within the context of the work or were otherwise integral to the story. In fact, Sayers subtlely criticized anti-semitism in several of her detective novels. One of Sayers's recurring (and sympathetic) characters, the Hon. Frederick Arbuthnot, marries a Jew, the daughter of the murder victim in Whose Body?, to the cheerful acceptance of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane.
As noted above, Sayers fell deeply in love (1921-1922) with the author John Cournos (1881-1956), a Russian-born American Jew. The affair ended disastrously but became the basis for Harriet Vane's relationship with murder victim Boyes in Strong Poison. Vane had agreed to live "in sin" with Boyes on the basis of his claim not to believe in marriage, but when he decided he wanted to marry Vane after all, she broke off the relationship owing to his hypocrisy. Similarly, Cournos refused to make a commitment to marriage and children with Sayers, much to her despair. While there are clear parallels between Sayers's relationship with Cournos and Harriet Vane's relationship with Philip Boyes, Sayers omitted the religious difference from her fictional version of the story; in fact, she made the fictional Boyes the son of an Anglican clergyman. This plot, then, can scarcely be characterized as anti-semitic.
Dorothy Sayers' letters to Cournos, continuing through 1925, are in a collection at Houghton Library, Harvard University. Sayers remains popular within academic circles, even among scholars who are authorities on issues of anti-semitism.
Sayers in work by other authors
Sayers's work was frequently parodied by her contemporaries (and sometimes by herself). A particularly interesting example is "Greedy Night" (1938) by E. C. Bentley, the author of the early modern detective novel Trent's Last Case, a work which Sayers admired.
Sayers appears, with Agatha Christie, as a title character in Dorothy and Agatha [ISBN 0-451-40314-2], a fictional murder mystery by Gaylord Larsen, in which a man is murdered in her dining room, and Sayers has to solve the crime.
Jill Paton Walsh has completed and published two additional novels about Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane: Thrones, Dominations, based on an unfinished novel; and A Presumption of Death, based on the "Wimsey Papers", letters ostensibly written by various Wimseys and published in The Spectator during World War II.
Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife, has claimed in interviews that her main characters, Henry and Clare, are loosely based on Sayers' Peter and Harriet.
Lord Peter Wimsey makes a cameo appearance in Laurie R. King's A Letter of Mary, one of a series of books relating the further adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and his equally talented partner and spouse, Mary Russell.
External links
- The Dorothy L. Sayers Society http://www.sayers.org.uk/
References
- Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul by Dr. Barbara Reynolds.
- Dorothy L. Sayers: a Biography by James Brabazon
- [Maker and Craftsman] by Alzina Stone Dale
- [Illustrated Bibliography of 1st Editions]
- Op. I by Dorothy Sayers (poetry): http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/sayers/opi/dls-opi.html
- The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy L. Sayers: http://www.gbt.org/text/sayers.html
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