Dorothy L Sayers: A Biography

Colin Duriez

• Publisher: Lion Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780745956930
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Dorothy L. Sayers was a woman of contrasts.

A strong Christian, she had a baby - out of wedlock - by a man she did not love. Possessing a fierce intellect, she translated Dante, and also created one of the most popular fictional detectives ever in Lord Peter Wimsey. Drawing on material often difficult to access, particularly her collected letters, Colin Duriez reassesses Sayers' life, her writings, her studies, and her faith to present a rich and captivating portrait of this formidable character.

1

LOOKING BACK: TO THE BEGINNING AND LATER ON (1893–97, 1943)

I am writing to ask if you would allow me to confer upon you the Degree of D.D. [Doctor of Divinity] in recognition of what I regard as the great value of your work….

William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury¹

The recollections of friends and neighbours, as well as extant letters, can sometimes give quite a vivid impression of single days – and highly significant ones at that – in the life path of Dorothy Leigh Sayers.² She was someone you would notice.

Let us go to one day in wartime – Saturday, 4 September 1943, to be precise – when the popular author received a letter which greatly surprised, pleased, and alarmed her in equal measure. Sayers was at home in the small town of Witham, Essex, which is a station on the train line from London to Colchester on the eastern coastal plain of England, and stands on the ancient Roman road between those places. She was there by preference rather than at her apartment in London, where her work tended to be interrupted by visitors. She presumably took breakfast promptly at 8:30 that day as usual, and it was over the meal that she would have opened the formally addressed letter to “Miss Sayers”. Her husband, Major Oswald Arthur “Atherton” Fleming, was likely to be just about heard resurrecting in his distant bedroom, or may have gone for his bath also in the part of the house which had once been located next door, before being connected to their house after being bought by Sayers for this purpose.

During her own leisurely after-breakfast bath we can expect her to be turning over the contents of the letter in her ever-active mind, neglecting her habit of reading or working in the comfortable suds. No doubt sometimes her lengthy immersion in the bath gave her some respite from the demands of domestic life, and the storms of her sometimes tetchy husband, long troubled by disorders from the previous war over a quarter of a century ago.

After the bath the domestic chores could resolutely be faced, like the Saturday shopping. This was a task complicated by wartime austerity. A growing list of items were now rationed. Dorothy Sayers would have carried her small, neat ration book as she went from shop to shop along the main street of the compact but bustling town. There were vegetables to get from the greengrocer, meat from the butcher, bread and perhaps cakes from the baker, and, for rare items like cheese, biscuits, jam, and tea, she would, in hope, enter the grocer’s shop – the door of which rang a bell when she opened it to alert staff to a customer’s arrival.

Sayers, purposely as usual, walked down the street toward the centre of town in her mustard-brown two-piece outfit with its rather long jacket, in beige-coloured stockings and stout brown shoes. Crowned with a black velour hat, the tall, bulky woman could seem formidable. She might have noticed a neighbour’s small boy, who perhaps jolted memories of her son John Anthony, from fifteen years or so ago. Unknown to her, the boy might even have been the one who remembered years later that he thought Mrs Fleming looked a bit like a battleship as she steadfastly surged down the street, avoiding the occasional car as she crossed the road to get to a shop on her list. A charitable boy might have acknowledged in his mind however that she was always pleasant to him, and he may even have observed a characteristic but almost secret smile that made her much less formidable.

That Saturday morning in early autumn, as she proceeded through town, we can expect that she was all the time pondering the letter she had received, and how to respond to it. It began:

Dear Miss Sayers,

I am writing to ask if you would allow me to confer upon you the Degree of D.D. [Doctor of Divinity] in recognition of what I regard as the great value of your work especially The Man Born to Be King and The Mind of the Maker. I have consulted the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford who cordially approves my going forward.³

It was signed by William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

It was some days before Sayers hesitatingly replied, asking whether the offer could be changed to that of a D. Litt., a Doctor of Letters, as she felt that she did not deserve a divinity degree. She pointed out that she had come to writing both the series of broadcast plays, The Man Born to Be King, and the book, The Mind of the Maker, as an established writer rather than a “Christian person”. It was essential to her work that she was free to write, even if it meant using the vernacular of the street, should the story require it. While she was clear that the divinity degree was not intended as an emblem of the sacred, she would feel more at her ease if she stood as a notable and acceptable type of Christian. She added that she was never convinced that she truly was one, or had rather perhaps only been enamoured by what had been called “an intellectual pattern”, thinking of her friend Charles Williams.

Dorothy Sayers had always been deeply aware that her Christian beliefs were not fundamentally undergirded by deep religious emotion (like John Wesley feeling his heart “strangely warmed” at his conversion), and remarkably, just weeks before, her friend Charles Williams had challenged her over whether her expressed Christian convictions were too much based on its powerful dogmas, which he felt was a harmful position in their day. This was a challenge he had also put to himself. After mentioning how they had recently discussed the intellectual pattern of belief they both loved, Williams had written:

…I feel that this matter… is very serious indeed. There is a point at which you and I will no longer be able to get away with an explanation of how admirable we think the pattern is, and I think that point is very near for both of us. I know as well as you do of the bye-ways [sic] of the literary mind, but I do not feel that they are going to be much excuse. There are awful moments when I think that perhaps it is precisely people like us who are enthralled by the idea and stop there who are really responsible for a great deal of the incapacity and the harm [presumably, over the effects of the way Christian belief was championed at that time].⁴

Sayers characteristically did believe, however, in the truly passionate nature of the intellect, and it was in the white heat of her reasoning power that she wrote her famous mystery stories with their ordered world, and penned her pieces on Christian dogma and on the Christian basis for valuing women as fully human beings with brains rather than as beings limited to tightly predefined roles in society. She also felt very deeply the reality of sin in human lives, and in the corporate guilt thus shared.⁵ As well as the danger of being associated too much with the church, weakening her artistic work as a writer, a deeper worry for her in accepting the Lambeth degree would be how this could inspire the popular press to delve into her private life as a celebrity writer. She thought of her closely guarded secret of her son, and how as a single parent she’d had to arrange for a close older cousin to raise him for her. The situation was even more complex because of the child’s accidental conception “out of wedlock”, as it was expressed in those days; along with the child being labelled “illegitimate” or a “bastard”. Then there was the fact that, soon after, she had married a divorced man who was not the father (but who was party to the secret), and any divorce was heavily frowned upon in 1943. She also couldn’t ignore the way her BBC Radio plays about the life of Christ, with Jesus representing the straight speech of a real first-century man, had been savaged by many conservative Christians who had not even listened to the broadcasts but nevertheless judged them as blasphemous. She had enjoyed the battle to keep them on air, however.

The writer continued to share her misgivings with the sympathetic archbishop, and eventually declined the honour with his blessing.⁶ The shopping, the everyday household chores, and her primary work of writing continued as usual, resolutely driven by her vision of life and her calling as an artist and a maker.

* * * * *

Sayers once said she was “a citizen of no mean city”⁷ in an unfinished memoir, quoting from Saint Paul, on Tarsus. The city in her case was Oxford, England, where she was born, spent her early life, later returned to study at Somerville College, and then came back to again in order to work for a publisher for a time. She had relations here for a period – her widowed aunt Maud, and her cousin Margaret Leigh whose undergraduate study at Somerville overlapped with hers. Her son, John Anthony Fleming, would one day study at Balliol, the college of her detective creation Lord Peter Wimsey. She would in later years visit her Oxford friend C.S. Lewis occasionally and, more frequently, Charles Williams in the last years of his life. The city was, without hesitation, her first love. She saw it as different from any other in the world. Going there made her feel she was coming home. In one of Sayers’ last mystery novels, Gaudy Night (1935), where she vividly creates the fictional Shrewsbury College in Oxford, the female detective Harriet Vane speaks for her author when she similarly endorses the city. It was the living city of her dreams. In another story of the 1930s, Harriet marries Lord Peter Wimsey at Oxford’s St Cross Church, where Charles Williams would one day be buried.

Accounts made of Sayers’ childhood are inevitably dominated by her memories of it, due to the unfinished memoir and a companion incomplete novel of hers intended in part to capture her childhood.⁸ In these, written around the beginning of her forties, she displays an extraordinary recollection of a number of particular events, including many from her first four-and-a-half years, when she started life in Oxford. These early memories capture some of the eccentricities of the city, which more than likely helped to determine the unusual life of the child prodigy.

The only child of Revd Henry Sayers, MA, and Helen Mary “Nell” Sayers, née Leigh, was born within earshot of the famous sound of the great bell of the Tom Tower of Christ Church as summer approached in 1893. Dorothy’s first home, 1, Brewer Street, was located at the Christ Church Choir School, down the narrow-cobbled road off St Aldate’s in Oxford. The house now carries a blue plaque inscribed:

Dorothy L. Sayers
Writer and Scholar
was born here
13 June 1893

From Brewer Street, just across St Aldate’s thoroughfare, lies the large college of Christ Church itself. Dorothy’s father was headmaster of the Choir School and a chaplain at Christ Church Cathedral. Henry and Nell had been married the previous year, Nell joining Henry in Oxford from Shirley, near Southampton. Nell’s ancestors were mainly unremarkable landed gentry on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast from Southampton. Her father, Frederick Leigh, in contrast, was a distinguished solicitor, Latin scholar, practical Christian, humourist (he occasionally contributed to the satirical periodical, Punch), and was active in the Liberal Party. Of the Leigh family, writer Margaret Leigh, a younger cousin of Dorothy, in her memoir, The Fruit in the Seed, spoke of Aunt Mabel’s obsession with genealogy (something for which Dorothy had a flair): “I had an aunt who asserted that the Isle of Wight Leighs were descended from the royal house of Wessex. Having proved to her own satisfaction that she was the thirty-second cousin of King Alfred, she kept among her treasures a replica of the jewel that lies at the Ashmolean in Oxford.”⁹ When Dorothy was christened on 15 July in Christ Church Cathedral, Henry, as chaplain, performed the baptism. A few months afterwards, early in 1894, the family moved along to the more spacious and neighbouring number 3, Brewer Street, a move auguring further changes ahead for the family.

Though born in Norfolk, Henry had distant Irish roots in County Tipperary, and one of his achievements was that of his being a fellow student at Magdalen College, Oxford, with Oscar Wilde. They appear together with others in an informal photograph. Of her parents, though it was Henry who had the Oxford degree, it was from her mother that Dorothy inherited her sparkling intelligence and fluent use of a pen. Henry, at six foot two, did pass on some distinctive genes to his child which would make her tall for a woman, as people often observed. Unusually for the period, her father encouraged Dorothy, whom he adored, to aim for study at Oxford and, with this in mind, would begin teaching her Latin at the age of seven. His engagement with and delight in music was also passed on to his daughter. Sayers acknowledged that he must have been dull company for his mother, who had never been inclined to marry a man of the cloth, and celebrated her mother by acknowledging the Leigh lineage in her insistence upon being known as an author by the name Dorothy L. Sayers, “L.” indicating “Leigh”. Sayers, however, would have clergymen in her novels that are cast in a positive light, all of whom have recognizable traits of Henry in their characters, particularly the affectionate rendering of Reverend Theodore Venables in her magnificent story, The Nine Tailors (1934).

Nell Sayers comes over as being isolated enough without losing her husband at times to the hidden ceremonies of the Freemasons. Sayers suspected that her father had not really taken to teaching, which is why he went for a rural living after nearly six years of marriage. That he did make some effort in his role as headteacher, however, is evident as he later (but in an oddly restrained way) fondly remembered what he could of unrecorded life at the school house in Brewer Street. Recalling them caused some pain for Henry, even though these had been usually pleasant days. This was true even when he felt he could still hear the benign chimes from Tom Tower, uttering the farewell call to turn off the lights.

Henry’s reference to the chiming bell from nearby Tom Tower is a reminder of just how eccentric and often surprising Oxford life can seem to an outsider, and how normal to a participant in it. The ringing at 9:05 each evening was used by the Choir School for lights out, which echoes an original purpose of the chimes for centuries as the beginning of the nightly curfew for Oxford’s university students: the students had to be within their respective college gates by this time. The eccentricity is deepened by the fact that the bell tolled from 9:05 p.m., rather than from 9:00 p.m., as might be expected. There was a clear reason for this in the eyes of the Oxford scholars. Oxford Mean Time, judged by latitude, is in fact five minutes behind Greenwich¹⁰ Mean Time (GMT, of course, is historically the defining point of planetary-time demarcation). Tom Tower stands in one of the most imposing and magnificent of Oxford’s many colleges, and was designed by Sir Christopher Wren in the seventeenth century; the authoritative bell-ringing added to its character, symbolizing the dominance and distinction of the seat of learning.

The eccentricity doesn’t end there. The bell-ringing at 9:05 presents another puzzle for those unfamiliar with the arcane world of the famous university. Thomas Hardy portrays the mystery vividly in his last Wessex novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), calling Oxford “Christminster”. Jude is a self-educated and intellectually gifted stonemason who longs to be a scholar and who is drawn toward the historic city, with its classical learning and medieval architecture. He eventually journeys there, arriving after the working day is over.

It was a windy, whispering, moonless night. To guide himself he opened under a lamp a map he had brought. The breeze ruffled and fluttered it, but he could see enough to decide on the direction he should take to reach the heart of the place.

After many turnings he came up to the first ancient mediaeval pile that he had encountered. It was a college, as he could see by the gateway. He entered it, walked round, and penetrated to dark corners which no lamplight reached. Close to this college was another; and a little further on another; and then he began to be encircled as it were with the breath and sentiment of the venerable city. When he passed objects out of ...