For three magical hours every week, tucked away in a tiny conference room with four other students, I attend a class entirely dedicated to a writer many have never even heard of: Dorothy L. Sayers. Sayers, the witty and versatile British novelist, essayist, and playwright, has been overshadowed by contemporaries like C.S. Lewis for whom, in many respects, she paved the way. Throughout her life, Sayers pursued her many interests with courage, producing a canon of varied and insightful work. We forget her at our peril.
Dr. Alan Jacobs, the Baylor Great Texts professor who made the unusual choice of teaching an entire undergraduate course on a little-known female author, is himself a prolific and versatile writer. In 2005, he wrote one of the most famous biographies of C. S. Lewis and has chosen Dorothy Sayers as his next biographical subject. In addition to being the Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Baylor Honors Program, Dr. Jacobs is also a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.
Each work we examine in Dr. Jacob’s class is carefully placed in the context of Sayers’ life. Sayers was born in 1893 in the town of Oxford. After growing up in the country, she returned to Oxford and graduated from one of the few women’s colleges. Following university, she worked in a variety of jobs including teaching, advertising, and publishing.
I had not been reading Sayers long before I was wondering how on earth she was not more celebrated. I asked Dr. Jacobs why she did not spark interest in more students. One reason, Jacobs said, may be her reputation as a detective novelist. “A lot of people in academic circles don’t think detective stories are serious enough to be worth studying.” But Sayers was much more than a detective story writer. According to Jacobs, “when she turned to writing as—well many people say a Christian apologist, but I say a Christian catechist—at the time in England she was really popular, really widely read. But eventually, C.S. Lewis, her contemporary and friend, kind of took over that role, so everybody started paying so much attention to Lewis that there wasn’t a whole lot of time left over for her… people just didn’t realize how gifted she was…So her reputation kind of remained confined to England and didn’t really spread in a serious way in the USA.”
What Sayers was able to accomplish with the genre of detective stories was by no means unacademic. “She’s the person who is responsible more than anyone else for turning the detective story into serious literary fiction,” Dr. Jacobs said. He explained how Sayers paved the way for more recent writers such as P. D. James, who is lauded as a great English novelist despite writing “only” detective stories. Sayers’ detective stories went beyond the conventional bounds for the genre, writing not just mysteries, but social commentaries. In particular, Gaudy Night and The Nine Tailors introduce worlds in which the whodunit is but a small aspect, and the relationships and social questions of the day are the real focus. The questions Sayers explores in these novels are strikingly relevant to the present day, including struggles of personal integrity and tensions between a woman’s vocation and family.
“She’s the person who is responsible more than anyone else for turning the detective story into serious literary fiction”
Sayers was not only a pioneer in detective stories but also in radio. “There had been radio dramas before her but nothing that had the kind of impact that her twelve plays on the life of Jesus had,” Dr. Jacobs remarked. He explained that Sayers paved the way in radio drama and religious broadcasting before Lewis ever gave the lectures that turned into Mere Christianity. “The idea that that radio presentations of the Christian faith could be intellectually substantive and artistically substantive we get from her…she was someone who was trying out new genres, new forms of artistic work, she was very much exploratory and innovative and pioneering, and I just don’t think that is recognized as much today.” He attributed this neglect to the bad reputation inevitably earned by her Christianity, and the misconception that her work in mysteries and radio was not academically valuable. She was not taken as seriously as writers like Virginia Woolf, since the genres in which she wrote, detective fiction and radio, were not then considered high quality literature. “But it is serious,” Jacobs said, “it’s brilliant stuff and I think it’s not well enough known now.”
Sayers certainly had an exploratory spirit, writing in multiple genres, including detective stories, plays, essays, and radio. Readers who have never heard of Sayers before may very well wonder where exactly to start. Dr. Jacobs recommended her novel The Nine Tailors for those who are not particularly interested in detective fiction per se, because while there is a mystery, it is not the heart of the novel. There are also her polemical writings, including the pithy essay Are Women Human? which my classmates and I found extremely thought-provoking and relevant for the questions women continue to struggle with today. Other essays include The Greatest Drama Ever Staged, and The Lost Tools of Learning, the latter being foundational to the classical Christian homeschooling movement. My personal favorite is Gaudy Night, from her delightful Lord Peter Wimsey series. I recommend the BBC TV adaptation starring Edward Petherbridge and Harriet Walter.
“The thing that has really stood out to me more than anything else is just how courageous she was on so many levels, how situations that would have defeated a lot of people didn’t defeat her.”
On a personal level, one of the most impactful parts of the class has been hearing about the character of Sayers herself. It is clear from how he talks in class that Jacobs has been deeply affected by Sayers’ character as well. Through the process of writing Sayers’ biography, Jacobs said, “The thing that has really stood out to me more than anything else is just how courageous she was on so many levels, how situations that would have defeated a lot of people didn’t defeat her.” He described how she abandoned writing detective stories to try her hand at writing a religious play. Writing those detective books was safe. It paid the bills, and Sayers was the main provider for her family. But she took the risk and pursued something new. Then, years later, she happened to read Dante during a WWII air raid and decided to translate The Divine Comedy: “she was passionate about it. she was fascinated by it, she just couldn’t stop thinking about Dante… she had no reason to think that that was ever going to be lucrative for her and it never really was…She was just fearless about stuff like that and it didn’t make sense on the practical level but it made sense to her internally and that’s just really, really admirable I just don’t think that there are very many people who are that courageous.”
As a college student, Sayers’s fearless character is particularly inspiring to me. The task of finding my vocation is intimidating. Dorothy Sayers never hesitated to follow the paths she felt called to, even when it meant leaving what was safe to explore new horizons. One of the first women educated at Oxford, she developed her writing in the midst of bearing a child out of wedlock and struggling through a difficult marriage. The exhaustion of living in today’s world, where we are told to calculate the probability of a successful marriage, how many children one can afford, and how to save enough to retire comfortably, can be debilitating. The adventurous life of Dorothy Sayers is bracing. She invested her talents boldly, pursued her passions, and kept forging ahead, regardless of circumstances. She is an exemplar to the modern man and woman alike to take one day at a time because we cannot anticipate the golden opportunities we may miss if we chart our path too carefully.
