The Life and Mind of Dorothy L. Sayers

(An Encomium)

May 15, 2025

"Christianity is as plain and common as bread. The simplest person or the youngest child can be a Christian, by faith and baptism." - Dorothy Sayers

The name of Dorothy L. Sayers has, by no means, the same level of recognition as that of C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien, but it is fair to say that though her fame has not spread quite so broad, her calibre is not less. Her great value may be seen, in part, by the fact that those who do know her name often know it for very different reasons. For some, the name of Dorothy L. Sayers calls to the mind reflections upon classical education and the need for its promotion and preservation. Those in this category probably came to know the name Dorothy L. Sayers in light of her essay, The Lost Tools of Learning, which is considered essential reading for teachers in most classical Christian schools today. Still, others know nothing of this Dorothy L. Sayers, rather, they know Dorothy L. Sayers as a translator of classic texts. For, her name adorns certain editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy as well as the Old French Epic The Song of Roland among several other pieces. Yet again, some know nothing of Dorothy L. Sayers the educational reformer, nor the translator of classic literature, they only know Dorothy L. Sayers as one of the leading ladies of detective fiction. Indeed she is probably best known for being the author of fourteen volumes of novels and short stories featuring the British aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey. Still, others may not know her for any of these things, but may have encountered one of the theatrical plays she wrote.

The fact that Dorothy L. Sayers may be known in any one of so many different ways, and yet remain completely unknown to those same people for her other talents, is really a testament to her genius. The diversity of her talents are such that when one considers any one part of her work it is easy to be convinced, because they are of such unquestionably superior quality, that this part must be the whole of her work and all that she did with herself. It is for this reason that people are often so surprised to hear that one of their favorite translators was also a novelist, or that one of their favorite novelists was also an educational reformer, or that the person who set them onto classical education was also a playwright. Could one person be so many things and worthy of recognition in all instances? In a word, yes. Dorothy L. Sayers was all of these things and in all of these things she excelled. If, indeed, you do not know the name of Dorothy L. Sayers, or if you, like many others before you, have only known her in some partitioned or fragmented way, let me urge you to correct this at once, even this very instant.

Dorothy L. Sayers was born to Rev. Henry Sayers and his wife Helen Mary Sayers (lovingly referred to as “Nell”) in Oxford, England on June 13, 1893. Her father was at that time the headmaster of Christ Church Cathedral School and the chaplain of Christ Church College which is part of Oxford University. Sayers’ grandfather on the paternal side had also been a minister, and her grandfather on the maternal side had been a solicitor who had descended from landed gentry on the Isle of Wight. Sayers was proud of her connection with the well-bread history of the Leigh family, that is her mother’s line, and therefore she added the “L” in Dorothy L. Sayers to her name for all of her professional work. Undoubtedly the roots of both sides of her family had a profound effect upon her. The strong Christian influence of her father and grandfather, both ministers in the Church of England, can be seen both in her promotion of the Christian faith, particularly in her later works. Her love of class and good breeding, which she got from her mother’s side, may be seen in her choice of picking a gentleman of leisure as the protagonist of her mystery novels.

In her earliest years Sayers was educated at home, but at the age of fifteen she was sent to Godolphin School, an all girls boarding school in Salisbury. Most of the girls at the school had begun their attendance at the age of eight and, in consequence of this, Sayers always felt something like an outsider due to her late entry. Even so, she threw herself into the life of the school as much as possible, especially into the theater, and she even wrote several of the plays which the girls performed at the school during her time there. When a terrible outbreak of the Measles hit the school in 1911 Sayers came very close to death. Her mother was permitted to move into the school to help nurse her back to health. Thankfully, over the course of time she eventually recovered her health completely.

In 1912 Sayers won the Gilchrist Scholarship. This scholarship existed to promote women’s ability to gain a university education, something which at the time was typically only permitted to men. Somerville College was an all women's college at Oxford University. Oxford University, while permitting women to study there at that time, did not officially grant degrees to women. In 1915 Sayers was unofficially recognized by her college as having merited a first class degree in Medieval French, but it wasn’t until 1920, when Oxford officially changed its rules, that she was officially awarded a fully recognized diploma by the University.

During her time at Somerville College she made several friends with whom she would continue to be close for the rest of her life. With her friends Amphilis Middlemore and Charis Ursula Barnett she began a group called The Mutual Admiration Society, a kind of literary club in which the members would share their writing with one another and receive critique and encouragement. Sayers once remarked, rather humorously, upon the name of their club saying that the girls in it were so fond of one another that “if we didn't give ourselves that title, the rest of College would." This club was to Sayers what the all male literary group known as The Inklings was to such names as C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams, and a number of other literary greats of the day.

After her graduation Sayers began her writing career in earnest and published several volumes of poetry. These works were far from bringing in enough to afford all her wants and so she also took a position in 1922 as a copywriter for S. H. Benson, England’s premiere advertising agency of the time. During her time there she led several highly successful advertising campaigns. Most noteworthy for its popularity was the campaign she worked on for Guinness, the maker of the famous stout beer. Guinness used a Toucan as a mascot for their product, a suggestion of Sayers’, and she wrote these lines used by the company for many years “If he can say as you can/Guinness is good for you/How grand to be a Toucan/Just think what Toucan do!"

Sayers continued her work at S. H. Benson until 1930 but her time there was not solely devoted to advertising campaigns. In 1923 she published her first work of detective fiction featuring her sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, in a book called, “Whose Body?” The book was received with such mixed reviews that it was both berated as “a poor specimen of sensationalism" and also hailed as a "First-rate construction ... a thoroughly satisfactory yarn from start to finish." Sayers would go on to write many more novels and short stories featuring Lord Peter and her success and sales grew considerably. She began to be mentioned alongside other great names in detective fiction like Agatha Christie and G. K. Chesterton and, indeed, she became a friend to both.

In 1930 Sayers became one of the founding members of The Detection Club a society of which G. K. Chesterton, the author of the Father Brown stories among many other important works, was made the original president. In the beginning the group formed as just a few friends meeting together, informally, over dinner, to talk about their writing. After a short time, however, having found these meetings to be thoroughly invigorating, they agreed to formalize the club and even to take possession of official premises where the club could hold their meetings. These premises were paid for by members of the club through works of collaboration both in print and in radio productions. As one of the clubs most ardent supporters Sayers composed an initiation ritual for new members in which they were required to swear off any use of, "Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God" as a means for explaining away difficult parts of their mysteries. Further they had to promise "to observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Conspiracies, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-Doors, Chinamen, Super-Criminals and Lunatics, and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science."

In the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, without much word of explanation, Sayers began to move away from writing detective fiction and began to focus on theatrical plays, critical essays, and other non-fiction writing. Among the most notable of her non-fiction works is The Mind of the Maker, published in 1941, in which Sayers explores the mechanisms of human creativity and compares and contrasts it with the creativity of God. During the very early part of World War II she wrote a series of letters, under the names of various characters who had appeared in Lord Peter Wimsey stories (particularly those of the Wimsey family), in which she expressed her own views on many issues of life such as, culture, politics, religion, etc. The letters were published under the title of The Wimsey Papers.

In 1947 Sayers published her essay, The Lost Tools of Learning, in which she expressed her real concern about the modern trends of education and its tendency to move away from the tried and true approach to education (i.e. the Liberal Arts). Sayers defended the Trivium (Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric) and its value to not merely impart knowledge of particular subjects, but to equip young minds with the means of learning absolutely anything they might desire or need to learn. Contrasted with mere training in technical skills, or highly specialized training becoming more common in modern education, she argued that a true education is one which equips the learner to understand, not simply to do.

It was during the second World War when Sayers said she began to take a greater interest in the works of Dante. She described being in air raid shelters while the Nazis were bombing England and reading the whole Divine Comedy in its original Italian text. She described finally seeing the text for what it really was, stating, “I saw the whole lay-out of Hell as something actual and contemporary; something that one can see by looking into one's self, or into the pages of tomorrow's newspaper. I saw it, that is, as a judgment of fact, unaffected by its period, unaffected by its literary or dogmatic origins and I recognised at the same moment that the judgment was true.” This love for Dante’s work would later inspire her to work on a new translation of the Divine Comedy. This project, however, was left unfinished at the time of her death in 1957. The third volume, Paradiso, was not quite finished when she left this world quite suddenly due a stroke. It would eventually be finished on her behalf by one of her friends, Barbara Reynolds.

Up to this point I have described Dorothy L. Sayers, the professional, but I have not said much about her personal life. What can be said about her character there? To start we can say that for all of Sayers’ seemingly superhuman intellect, she was just as human as we in her capacity to make mistakes. It was during her time at S. H. Benson that she entered into a romantic liaison with a man named Bill White, by whom she gave birth, out of wedlock, to a son in 1924. Making things even harder for Sayers, it turned out, to her great surprise, that Mr. White was actually already married and once he learned of the pregnancy he refused to have anything more to do with Sayers and rejected any claim to their son. When Sayers boldly exposed the truth to Mrs. White the latter actually met her with kindness and helped her set up in the countryside where Sayers could keep the matter quiet. The child was delivered and then sent to be raised by her first cousin, Ivy Shrimpton, and Sayers managed to keep the entirety of the affair and the birth of a child from the rest of her family, as well as just about everyone else, for a very long time. She would later “adopt” her own son in 1935 when the boy was about ten years old. By this time she was married to a man named Oswald Arhtur Flemming (known as Mac to those closest to him) and she had a more established career and income. The total truth of this story was not really known by most people in its entirety until after Sayers had passed away.

Sayers’ literary work seems to exhibit consciousness of the mistakes of her younger years. It may be reasoned that her later stories in the Lord Peter Wimsey stories, especially with the introduction of the character named Harriet Vane, as well as the character of her later work on Dante and her other more explicitly Christian books and plays, reflected her genuine repentance and acknowledgement of her own imperfections. Many biographers have noted the similarities between Sayers and Harriet Vane and have made much of this. I think this is not without some justice.

When one first meets Miss Vane in the Lord Peter novels we find her on trial for murder. She has been accused of killing the man she had formerly lived with, unmarried. The man in question had formerly espoused ideas about the vanity of marriage as an institution and over time had worn down Miss Vane’s inhibitions until she consented to live with him as his mistress and forsake the more official union. At that time, as was quite right, there was a particular stigma against those who would choose to live together without being married. Harriet gave up a lot of dignity in the eyes of many by consenting to live with a man who was not her lawful husband, but she did so because she loved him and believed herself to be loved by him. When, however, some years later he proposed marriage she was indignant because she had been forced to give up that ideal and now felt she was being patronized by the offer, as if she had been placed on probation and had now been deemed worthy of a reward. As a result, she broke the relationship entirely and some months later the man was murdered and she was the main suspect. In this story, Strong Poison, the beloved sleuth Lord Peter sees Harriet upon the stand in court, sees her innocence as a certainty, and falls in love with her immediately.

Relating no more of the story in particular, I say all of this to simply point out that Harriet Vane comes on the scene as a woman who has obviously not made all the right choices, she has regrets, she lives under a cloud of shame and seems somewhat unacceptable to what may be called “polite company,” but she is also brilliant, she is also a mystery writer, and her features being called not quite beautiful, but definitely striking are all things that were said of Sayers herself. One biographer referred to Harriet Vane as Dorothy L. Sayer’s “alter ego” and it is hard to disagree. But in the relationship we see between her and Lord Peter, as it grows over time and results in marriage (five novels later), we see something happen in the life of both of these characters. We see in them both a turning away from the worldliness of their past lives and relationships, we see in them both the embrace of marriage as a good both for them and for society, and eventually (in three sweet short stories) we see in them both a settled happiness with their children that typifies two people living at the pinnacle of the good life. Through her work Sayers tells us of her own life and sets forth her own growing appreciation for biblical ideals and norms which are contrary to the spirit of the age that had captivated her for a time. If we want a perfect hero then we must look to Christ. If we want heroes of the sort that we may become, we must look to other sinners who have themselves looked to Christ.

To whom else might we compare the talent and brilliance of Dorothy L. Sayers? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the beloved Sherlock Holmes stories, seems a fitting figure. It is indubitable that the name of Sherlock Holmes is far more commonplace today than Lord Peter Wimsey, but popularity has never been a guarantee of greater excellence. In Sherlock we meet cold rationality and unapproachable arrogance. In Lord Peter we meet a man of both sense and sensibility. Ironically, Doyle himself became increasingly unhinged by an interest in irrational spirituality and mysticism. However, where Doyle went a direction opposite of his most famous character, Sayers, on the other hand, returned to the sense of her Christian upbringing and her writing and her life were harmonized. Whereas Sherlock Holmes is a static character, fixed just as much in his brilliance as his inhumane qualities from the first introduction of his person to His Last Bow, Lord Peter has a compelling story arch of personal growth and character development which begins in a kind of self-absorbed nihilistic bachelorhood but terminates in the place of a Christian family man. Though no one could question the value or brilliance of either of these authors nor of the characters they created, I argue that it is beyond question that the lesser known of the two is by far the more deserving of our admiration.

Sayers is in many ways an example for all of us to follow. In her passions and interests, she was diverse. In her professional work, she was exemplary. In her personal creativity, she was inspired. In her private friendships, she was earnest. About her mistakes and sins, she was penitent. When I think of those authors whose entire literary canon is worthy of taking the time to read I am happy to name Dorothy L. Sayers right next to her friend C. S. Lewis and other venerable names like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Sayers has the same kind of impeccability of mind that assures us, whenever we pick up one of her books, we are about to enjoy ourselves and be made better all at once.