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Dorothy Sayers
A Reluctant Prophet
The Daily Telegraph called it a “triumphant mixture of religious feeling, scholarship and plain humanity.”1 The writing was deemed exquisite and spiritually gripping by laypeople and clergy alike, including an Anglican priest, who urged his parishioners to buy tickets to see The Zeal of Thy House and to approach it as a religious experience in and of itself. For many Christian writers, this kind of praise would not have been out of the ordinary. But Dorothy Sayers was not your typical Christian writer. In fact, she didn’t consider herself a Christian writer at all but a mystery writer, an author of detective novels first and foremost. Dorothy wrote popular books about murder, suspense, and intrigue, which she considered her “proper job,” insisting that her foray into theology later in her life was purely accidental. She was, as her biographer and friend Barbara Reynolds called her, a reluctant prophet, albeit an influential one.
Educated at home by her academic father (who was headmaster and chaplain of the Choir School at Christ Church College, Oxford, and later the rector at a small country church), her spirited mother, and a number of governesses, Dorothy spent much of her youth isolated from her peers, amusing herself by reading, writing poetry, and inventing imaginative stories. When she was fifteen, she left the tiny village of Bluntisham-cum-Earith to attend boarding school in Salisbury, where the students and teachers viewed her as odd, awkward, and standoffish. She was relieved to graduate in 1912, scholarship in hand, to attend what she called “the holy city”—Oxford University.
Dorothy majored in modern languages, and although she passed her final examinations with honors in 1915, because Oxford didn’t acknowledge female graduates, she did not officially receive her degree until 1920. In the meantime she went to work, first for a small publishing firm in London and later at an advertising agency, where she wrote snappy copy for Guinness beer and Coleman’s mustard. To fill the time while in between jobs, Dorothy conceived the character of amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey and wrote Whose Body?, the first of more than a dozen novels and short stories still widely read today.
Guilt and Grief
While Dorothy’s professional life was stable and productive, her personal life erupted into chaos in 1923. Heartbroken after the demise of a serious relationship with writer John Cournos, she found herself pregnant by a casual boyfriend who had no inclination to marry her or parent the child. Two days before her due date, finally realizing she couldn’t change the man’s mind, she checked into a private maternity home in Southbourne, a seaside resort town far from Oxford and her parents’ town, where she secretly delivered a baby boy.
Two days before, Dorothy had written to her cousin Ivy, begging for her help with what she described as a “friend’s” infant. Ivy agreed to care for the child. A few weeks later when Dorothy knocked on Ivy’s door, baby John Anthony in her arms, she confessed she was his mother, insisting that her cousin keep her secret. Ivy honored her promise. Dorothy’s parents died never knowing their daughter had borne them a grandson.
Always a pragmatist with an uncanny ability to compartmentalize her emotions, Dorothy quickly resumed business as usual. A few weeks after the birth she returned to work at the ad agency, telling colleagues only that she’d been ill. She kept up pretenses at the office and with her friends and family because she felt she had no other choice, but deep inside she suffered not only from terrible guilt and shame but also from grief over the loss of the child. Later, in the early years of her marriage to Oswald Atherton Fleming (who was known as Mac), she hoped her husband would eventually adopt John Anthony, but that plan never materialized.
Some of her biographers suggest that Dorothy did not truly want a child in her life. While Cournos’s refusal to have children was cited as one of the reasons for their breakup, Dorothy also admitted to friends that she didn’t much care for children. Her attitude toward John Anthony was businesslike at best. She was involved in his life from a distance—she wrote him letters, sent Ivy money for his care, and visited from time to time—but she also understood that the child could, and should, have only one proper mother. She was known as his “aunt,” and it wasn’t until many years later, when John Anthony applied for a passport and saw Dorothy’s name listed as his biological mother, that he realized her true relationship to him.
Dorothy the Diva
As her popular detective series began to produce a reliable income and a steady stream of royalty checks, Dorothy was finally able to risk venturing outside her standard genre. When Canterbury Cathedral approached her to write a religious play for a festival in 1937, she snapped up the opportunity. The response to The Zeal of Thy House was tremendous. Audiences from the public to the clergy to the media were enchanted, and she was soon asked to write a series of religious plays to be broadcast on the BBC Radio’s children’s hour.
Dorothy may have compartmentalized her emotions when it came to her personal life, but she didn’t suppress her opinions when it came to her job. She was notoriously difficult to work with—stubborn, impatient, inflexible, and at times downright self-righteous. When the producer’s assistant questioned whether the play’s language was over the heads of the young audience, Dorothy fired back a scathing response. “I knew how you would react to those passages,” she fumed. “It is my business to know. But it is also my business to know how my real audience will react, and yours to trust me to know it.”2 Dorothy deemed the assistant an unliterary critic, threatened the producer, and eventually tore up the original contract. As a result, a new contract was written, she was assigned the producer she’d originally wanted to work with, and the play was broadcast as part of BBC Radio’s regular programming rather than the children’s hour. In short, Dorothy got exactly what she’d wanted all along.
No “Bible Talk”
Dorothy’s religious writing appealed to audiences in part because her contemporary language was so accessible. She also was not afraid to push boundaries and challenge the norm. As biographer James Brabazon notes, “Dorothy’s particular blend of scholarship, imagination, vigour and homely realism was a revelation to radio listeners. Here was the sacred story springing to life in a way they had never heard it before.”3 Some, though, objected to her modern, colloquial style—like the Daily Mail, which ran the accusatory headline, “BBC ‘Life of Christ play’ in US Slang,” and the Protestant Truth Society, which petitioned the prime minister to have Dorothy’s plays banned. But Dorothy stood by her convictions. “Nobody, not even Jesus, must be allowed to ‘talk Bible,’” she wrote to her BBC producer. It must “appear as real as possible, and above all . . . Jesus should be presented as a human being and not like a sort of symbolic figure doing nothing but preach in elegant periods . . . even at the risk of a little loss of formal dignity.”4
Dorothy approached her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which she considered her best work, the same way: as a dramatist. She was surprised to find Dante funny, lively, and even bawdy at times, and she aimed to convey these often-overlooked characteristics in her translation in order to distinguish it from the many translations of The Divine Comedy already available on the market. “I think the trouble with [other translations] is that they have far, far too much reverence for their author,” she wrote. “They are afraid to be funny, afraid to be undignified; they insist on being noble, but they end up being prim. But prim is the one thing Dante never is.”5 At the time of her death thirteen years later, Dorothy had completed Inferno and Purgatorio and had begun Paradiso, which was finished by her friend (and later biographer) Barbara Reynolds.
Saved by a God-Given Intellect
In spite of her success as a Christian writer, Dorothy was never entirely comfortable in her role as an author-evangelist, even after her most famous religious plays, The Mind of the Maker and The Man Born to Be King, were broadcast on BBC Radio. She preferred to create art for its own sake, trusting that the moral would emerge, rather than create what she called propaganda art forms. “I do not know that I am much good at speaking about religious life, being a great deal stronger on doctrine than on practice,” she once quipped to a church audience.6 She also wrote, “I’ve got labeled as a writer of Christian Apologetics, but God knows it is the last thing I ever wished to be.”7 Dorothy didn’t even like to talk about religion with her peers. Once, after a meeting with both clerics and laity at the BBC, she griped in a letter to a colleague, “It sent me out in a mood for a stiff gin-and-tonic and the robust company of my heathen friends.”8
A deep spiritual struggle lay at the heart of Dorothy’s discomfort with religious writing. When her friend, the scientist and theologian John Wren-Lewis, accused Dorothy of staying within the safe confines of church dogma rather than sharing her personal spiritual views, she responded with candid humility, offering a rare glimpse of her inner spiritual state. “I am quite without the thing known as ‘inner light’ or ‘spiritual experience.’ . . . Neither God, nor (for that matter) angel, devil, ghost or anything else speaks to me out of the depth of my psyche. . . . I am quite incapable of ‘religious emotion.’”9
While Dorothy undoubtedly struggled with this lack of an emotional connection to God, she was neither apologetic nor regretful. Rather, she embraced her pragmatic approach to faith. “Since I cannot come through God through my intuition, or through my emotions, or through my ‘inner light’ . . . there is only the intellect left,” she wrote to Wren-Lewis. “Where the intellect is dominant it becomes the channel of all the other feelings. The ‘passionate intellect’ is really passionate. It is the only point at which ecstasy can enter. I do not know whether we can be saved by the intellect, but I do know that I can be saved by nothing else.”10
Dorothy was difficult and, at times, a diva. But she was also a survivor—fiercely independent, brilliant, and bold. One can’t help but respect and even admire her spunk, sass, and wit, and in many ways, her brash irreverence and frank demeanor contribute much to her appeal. She spoke her mind, argued passionately for what she believed, and wasn’t afraid to risk being disliked in order to stand behind her convictions.
We, of course, are the beneficiaries of Dorothy’s sharp intellect, which fueled her imagination and allowed her to create not only an entertaining detective in the enduring character of Peter Wimsey but an approachable, “human” Jesus and a host of accessible biblical stories as well. She also left us a unique and lasting legacy in the example of her honest, pragmatic approach to faith. Rather than grieve her lack of emotional connection to God, she celebrated the fact that God had gifted her with a unique avenue to pursue a relationship with him via her inquisitive, analytical mind. In doing so, Dorothy Sayers offers hope and comfort to those who come to God not through intuition or emotion but through the kind of passionate intellect that was her hallmark.11