Dorothy L(eigh) Sayers | Biography

Dorothy Leigh Sayers , British essayist, novelist, critic, scholar, and playwright, who made her reputation with the Lord Peter Wimsey detective stories, spent her final years on scholarship and chancel drama. Born in Oxford in 1893, the only child of Helen Leigh Sayers and the Reverend Henry Sayers , a distinguished scholar who served as headmaster for Christ Church Cathedral Choir School, Dorothy L. Sayers inherited her father's love of languages and music. From her maternal ancestor Percival Leigh (a writer for Punch) she inherited her rapier wit. Tutored at home, first in Oxford and later in the fen country, where her father was the parish priest, she mastered Latin, French, and German before she mastered Latin, French, and German before she was into her teens. Her experiences at the Godolphin School in Salisbury, which she attended in 1909-1911, provided her with some early amateur theatrical experience and great personal unhappiness. Illness took her home again, and she then earned the Gilchrist Scholarship to Somerville College at Oxford. While attending Somerville College she mixed language studies with continuing efforts at writing and producing amateur plays. A short play, The Mocking of Christ, which demonstrates Sayers 's zest for theological subject matter phrased in contemporary idiom, survives in Catholic Tales and Christian Songs (1918), a collection of her juvenilia.

After taking a first on her examinations in 1915 (though not granted a degree until 1920--with the first group of Oxford women graduates), Sayers took a series of jobs--as a French teacher at Hull Girls' School (1915-1917), as an editor at Blackwells publishing house in Oxford (1917-1919), and as an assistant to a dashing young man who captured her fancy, Eric Whelpton, who was running an exchange program for British and French schoolboys at Les Roches School in France (1919-1920). In 1921 she settled into a position at Benson's Advertising Agency in London, where she began writing the Lord Peter Wimsey detective stories. These eventually attracted a vast audience, and in 1931 her success at writing detective fiction allowed her to quit her advertising job. Her final Peter Wimsey story, the play Busman's Honeymoon, was her first effort at professional theater. It opened in London in 1936 and ran for 400 performances.

A friend, Muriel St. Clare Byrne, helped her to develop the comedy of manners with the plot of a thriller, about the honeymoon of Lord Peter and his famous author-sleuth-bride, Harriet L. Vane. The play was followed by a novel using the same plot, characters, and title, and the play later became a film, produced in 1940. (In fact, several books of the Lord Peter series have served as the basis for television, radio, and film scripts.)

By 1935, Sayers had confronted a series of personal tragedies. She had been disappointed in love, and in 1924 she gave birth to an illegitimate son, whose custody she relinquished to a cousin. Her 1926 marriage to writer Oswald Atherton Fleming was deteriorating because of Fleming's alcoholism, and in 1928 and 1929 her parents had died. Moreover, by the time she completed Busman's Honeymoon, she was weary of writing about Lord Peter Wimsey and was eager to develop her scholarly abilities and to write about her religious beliefs.

In 1936 the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral invited Sayers to write a play for the Canterbury Festival, which had earlier performed plays by T. S. Eliot and Charles Williams. For the occasion, she studied and wrote a verse drama about William of Sens, the twelfth-century architect who designed and rebuilt the cathedral choir after the great fire. His tragic fall from scaffolding in the cathedral choir allowed the author to develop ideas on the Christian artist, Christian vocations, and the perils of pride. The success of The Zeal of Thy House (1937) led to a series of requests that Sayers write other liturgical drama: The Devil to Pay (produced at Canterbury in 1939), which develops her ideas on the Faust legend; The Just Vengeance (produced at Litch-field Cathedral in 1946), a war play about God's justice and man's; and The Emperor Constantine (produced in Colchester in 1951), a massive history play about Constantine and the Nicene Creed.

All of these chancel dramas conform to the tradition established by T. S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, and Charles Williams. They use a blend of modern and ancient materials, often interpreting the present in the light of the past, making the tales vital through colorful use of contemporary speech and flashes of wit. Sayers loved poetry and rhetoric, enjoyed employing a chorus in her plays, and mingled the natural and supernatural. Her love of history and theology, as well as her wide knowledge of language and philosophy, led her into occasional difficult scenes, such as the presentation of the key arguments between Athanasius and Arius on the Unitarian versus Trinitarian doctrines of the Deity. But generally, she disclosed her scholarly bent only in such subtle methods as the use of pagan gods for Christian purposes that please the knowledgeable without offending the ignorant.

Her greatest triumph in drama was her BBC radio series, The Man Born to Be King, a cycle of plays based on the life and kingship of Christ. Here, she united her thorough knowledge of languages, her lifelong interest in theology, her humanizing genius, and her increasing skill in writing dialogue and developing characterization. The series was an immediate success. The Man Born to Be King has been a perennial favorite since 1941, heard over and over in numerous countries. It is probably the best known and most often produced of any theological drama written for the radio. The subsequent published form (1943) was also an immediate best-seller.

Sayers 's last decade was dedicated to medieval scholarship. She turned to translating Dante's Divine Comedy (1949-1962), interrupting that work briefly to produce a new translation of The Song of Roland (1957). She died in 1956 while still working on Dante's Paradiso . The work was completed by her friend and colleague Barbara Reynolds.

In several of her critical essays, Sayers discussed her ideas on creativity. The Mind of the Maker (1941) is an impressive discussion of the creative process, including some of her own experiences in writing and producing plays. In this imaginative effort at a "Christian aesthetic," she discovers and explains a trinity of creativity that parallels the Trinity of being. Her clearest statement of the rationale for religious drama is "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged," her explanation of the power in the Easter story and her analysis of the Incarnation as the basis for the dramatic form. This essay is included in Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World (1969).

Sayers 's brief career in drama shows little development. The early Lord Peter play and the failure of another comedy of manners, Love All, in 1940 convinced Sayers that comic drama was not the natural form for her ideas. (Ironically, she is better known today for the "Masterpiece Theatre" television productions based on the Lord Peter novels than for her own plays.) Liturgical drama provided her the appropriate occasions and audiences to practice the religious polemic writing about which she had become increasingly enthusiastic. She threw herself into the actual production, and she once said that in the theater she found that nearly ideal community she had hoped to find in the church. The themes of Sayers 's liturgical dramas vary little: the reality of evil, the folly of humanistic faith, the wisdom of the creeds and the church fathers, the reality and dramatic power of Jesus Christ.

Dorothy L. Sayers was remarkable as a scholar whose deep insights into the human tragedy were balanced by a keen sense of human comedy. Her sharp wit and her pleasure in the ridiculous surprise and delight; her careful craftsmanship, her range of language, her understanding of the creative process, and her enormous intellect satisfy and enlighten. Her blend of old values and new made her an impressive judge of the contemporary scene.