Dorothy L(eigh) Sayers | Biography

Although Dorothy L. Sayers is known chiefly for her detective fiction and somewhat less well for her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, she was also a prolific and controversial essayist and lecturer. She is among the more significant modern British Christian apologists; if she is not so well known as G. K. Chesterton or C. S. Lewis, for example, it is partly because her other work has overshadowed her expository prose.

Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born in Oxford on 13 June 1893 to the Reverend Henry Sayers and Helen May Leigh Sayers. After being graduated from Somerville College, Oxford, in 1915, she worked as a teacher of modern languages and as a reader for the Blackwell publishing firm, then, from 1922 until 1929, as a copywriter for a London advertising firm. In 1926 she married Capt. Oswald Atherton Fleming, who was then a successful journalist; within two years his health broke down, and he remained unemployed until his death in 1950. Sayers introduced her popular detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, in her first novel, Whose Body" (1923), and published her major mysteries over the next fourteen years. During that time Sayers wrote some essays, most of them concerned with the art of the detective story. Her introduction to Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928) speedily achieved the status of a classic. She distinguishes there between the "Romantic" or "purely sensational" and the "Classical" or "purely intellectual" lines of mystery writing, tracing both back to Poe. In this essay and in her introduction to Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror, Second Series (1931) Sayers notes and approves of a tendency to combine the detective and the psychological novel-a propensity of her own fiction as it developed through the 1930s. She also wrote reviews of mystery novels for the Sunday Times from 1933 to 1935.

By the end of the 1930s Sayers had tired of writing mysteries and was turning to other genres, primarily the drama and the essay-lecture. She had always been interested in many more things than detective stories, but her growing sense of vocation as a Christian writer and the exigencies of World War II were developing her into a trenchant and provocative commentator on public affairs. The first substantial result of this development was Begin Here: A War-Time Essay (1940), where Sayers is no longer the professional mystery writer discoursing on her craft but an interpreter of global issues. She sees war-any war-"not as an end, but a beginning," and she calls for some "creative line of action" to restore coherence to Western, Christian civilization. Concisely and sweepingly she describes the emergence of the modern world out of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Her next book-length essay was The Mind of the Maker (1941), which she considered an important continuation of her effort in Begin Here to give guidance to a dismayed, demoralized generation. It is also the most elaborate development of a subject that had long interested her and to which she would return in later essays and lectures: man as homo faber, the image of God the Creator. The Mind of the Maker-indisputably her greatest and most influential nonfiction book-develops an intricate analogy between the Trinity and the threefold activity of the creative writer. There is the initial Idea (the Father), the Energy (the Son) needed to be aware of and to contemplate the Idea, and the Power (the Holy Spirit) to execute the work, to communicate it to others. The theology and the analogy have been found faulty by some, but the book was admired by C. S. Lewis and other discriminating critics. It stands as an important modern work of Christian aesthetics, shedding light on the psychology as well as the theology of creativity.

Unpopular Opinions (1946) brings together twenty-one essays composed between 1935 and 1945. These pieces address contemporary issues of morality, aesthetics, and politics from a Christian perspective and include sharp polemics, witty discussions of the use and abuse of English, and playful, mock-scholarly studies of the Sherlock Holmes canon. One of the best-known essays in the book is "The Mysterious English," which explores the whimsy, inconsistency, and horror of abstraction or systematic theory that typify English law, language, and culture. Another essay, which has often been reprinted, is the 1938 address "Are Women Human"" Sayers deals wittily with what is now called male chauvinism but castigates ideologues and particularly assails the "error of insisting that there is an aggressively feminist 'point of view' about everything."

The seven essays in Creed or Chaos? and Other Essays in Popular Theology (1947), written in the early to mid 1940s, are more homogeneous. The title essay argues that dogmas-especially the doctrines of the Incarnation and Redemption-are important bases of thought and action, and it advises the Church of England to hold on to doctrinal and theological coherence and to resist nebulousness and sentimentality. The other essays also take up aspects of church doctrine and policy, emphasizing the excitement of dogma, the challenging aspects of Christ (who is depicted as decidedly not "Jesus meek and mild"), and the imperative need of making doctrines and dogmas meaningful to the modern layman.

Sayers's last intellectual interest, and one of her strongest, was Dante. She translated the Inferno and Purgatorio and had just gotten into the Paradiso when she died, apparently of a stroke, on 17 December 1957. Her introductions to Hell (1949) and Purgatory (1955) have become influential and popular treatments of Dante and his theological-political milieu. Somewhat more scholarly are her two collections of essays, Introductory Papers on Dante (1954) and Further Papers on Dante (1957), where she canvasses such subjects as Dante's humor, techniques, and worldview. A post-humous anthology, The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement (1963), has further material on Dante but also contains a significant piece on the novels of Charles Williams and an influential essay on educational reform, "The Lost Tools of Learning." Sayers's career as an essayist can be sorted into three phases: the introductions and reviews of the late 1920s and early 1930s dealing with detective fiction; the book-length essays and collections of the late 1930s and the 1940s on a variety of contemporary topics and on theology; and the Dante introductions and essays of the 1950s. Her work on Dante is a natural progression from the first two phases: she writes about him as a master of narrative (she found him an "incomparable story-teller"), as an energetic and incisive commentator on his times, and as a profound Christian writer.

Sayers's pieces on Dante have been criticized as too superficial, sketchy, and polemical, and indeed she may have overstressed Dante's comical side in her campaign to make him popular. But she was no dilettante. Soundly trained as a scholar, she studied the Dante literature intensely and had a good grasp of Dante's milieu. She succeeded in arousing a wider interest in his great poem; and her translations of the Divine Comedy, with her introductions and extensive commentaries, have continued to be influential in their paperbound editions.

Sayers was a scholar and critic whose essays are aimed at a nonprofessional, nonacademic audience, and they have the strengths and weaknesses characteristic of such an approach. Her prose is lively-even racy-and almost always pungent. Some of her essays have naturally become dated, but her discussions of detective fiction, Christian theology, aesthetics, and Dante must still be reckoned with in any thorough account of those subjects.