The Worlds of Dorothy L. Sayers: The Life and Works of the Crime Writer and Poet
By Stephen Wade.
Pen & Sword History, 2025.
Hardcover, 256 pages, $39.95/£25.00.
Reviewed by Adam Schwartz.
In 2011, A. N. Wilson numbered Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) among authors “it is hard to think of anyone reading now…they are crumbling before your eyes, like exhumed bones exposed to ultraviolet.” Wilson’s observation has largely held true. If still recognized as the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey and as a somewhat unlikely inspiration for classical education, Sayers’s multivalent talent has attracted few serious studies in this millennium, and Stephen Wade’s biography is the first one of the century. Even in her field of greatest fame, Sayers was excluded from Penguin’s 2022 reissue of “greenback” classic crime fiction. But these bones must live. Dorothy L. Sayers was the premiere female Christian intellectual of twentieth-century Britain, whose foremost accomplishments include being a pioneering detective novelist and religious dramatist, a daring translator of Dante, and a trenchant social critic who advanced a sacramental notion of work against technocratic utilitarianism. A Sayers renascence is thus imperative because her “passionate intellect” made prodigious contributions to crucial genres and concerns of the modern era.
While Wade worries that the Wimsey series risks overshadowing the rest of Sayers’s record, he concedes that she is the “public face” of Golden Age detective narratives. Yet he notes as well that she sought to expand the possibilities of “whodunit” genre fiction. Specifically, Sayers aimed to raise “the detective story to the level of the novel of manners.” She realized this ambition in Gaudy Night (her masterpiece) and Busman’s Honeymoon, which together resolved the Lord Peter Wimsey-Harriet Vane relationship in a self-styled “love story with detective interruptions.” Although this aspiration was sparked by Victorians like Wilkie Collins, Sayers adopted distinctively early-twentieth-century rhetorical devices to achieve it, such as the themes and tropes of Great War literature, the documentary mode burgeoning in interwar Britain, and the fascination of some modernists and emerging fabulists with myth and “faery”; she also anticipated elements of postmodernism, as in the metafictional reflections on detective tales uttered by Wimsey saga characters. In the process (as Christine Colón has shown), Sayers became an exemplary “middlebrow” writer, who conveyed the trends of high culture in a popular format that chimed with the common reader. Wade hence concludes that Sayers’s mysteries established “her own version of realism,” something “startingly new.”
Her efforts in drama had similar goals. A lifelong avocation, the theatre was a central concentration of Sayers’s last two decades. Her plays remained sensitive to her cultural context, but articulated her religious outlook more openly than the novels had. This fusion is revealed most notably in The Man Born to be King, a cycle recounting the life of Christ that was broadcast initially during World War II. At a time of growing secularization and totalitarian challenge to traditional creeds, Sayers used the mass-media of radio to defamiliarize the gospels in order to reawaken wonder at “the greatest drama in history.” Her endeavor was highly controversial: some listeners found the plays irreverently vulgar whereas others welcomed the renewal of the Christian story, including C. S. Lewis, who read The Man Born to be King every Holy Week. Sayers nonetheless continued to combat “dull dogma” through resonant restatements of orthodoxy as a lay theologian, and in further attempts to present theological and moral principles—ranging from the Nicaean creed to just war theory—on stage to demonstrate that “the dogma is the drama.” She eventually discerned a model instantiation of this maxim in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which was the consuming passion of her final years.
Sayers brought to her translation of and commentary on Dante’s epic the fresh perspective of a “scholar-poet” while displaying “reverence” for his text by replicating its terza rima rhyme-scheme in English. Spurred by Charles Williams’s thesis of the “Beatrician vision,” Sayers deemed The Divine Comedy a sacramental “Way of Affirmation” in which human love is the path to divine charity. Her grappling with Dante was the culmination of a lifetime interest in and practice of poetry. As Wade elucidates, Sayers had a “poetic heart” that manifested itself in original verse (her first two books were poetry collections), melodic fictional prose, versicle plays, and her principal translations; besides her version of Dante, Sayers utilized her mastery of medieval Old French acquired during her seminal undergraduate years at Oxford to render The Song of Roland for Penguin shortly before her death. Wade maintains that Sayers stood apart from predominant modernism, being capable in free verse but more secure in classical metre and diction. He nevertheless detects a strong personal tone in those traditional forms that yielded “her own brand of poetry.”
All these facets of Sayers’s corpus were marked by attentiveness to her age’s pressing issues. Her novels, plays, poems, and even literary criticism engaged numerous topical and prescient subjects, such as euthanasia, education, and the class system. She also addressed her century’s deeper social and cultural currents, chiefly the nature of work. In her aesthetic treatise, The Mind of the Maker, Sayers posited that human art and labor have a Trinitarian structure, being composed of an eternal Idea (“Father”), an incarnate Energy of it (“Son”), and a Power of response to its meaning (“Spirit”). Sayers grounded this analogy in a theological anthropology. Echoing J. R. R. Tolkien’s notion of “subcreation,” Sayers claimed that humans are creative creatures at root. If only God can make something ex nihilo, she held, people can make afresh out of that primal creation and thereby exfoliate reality through labor. To her, then, to be made in the image and likeness of God is to be a “maker and craftsman.”
Sayers consequently considered corruptions of creativity to be dehumanizing. In particular, she charged that mechanized mass production eliminates any personal quality from a laborer’s making, and she warned that the apparatus of industrial society strives to distract workers from this alienation by consumerist mystifications. In Murder Must Advertise, Sayers drew on her nine-year tenure at S. H. Benson to compare advertising agencies to drug dealers, peddling addictive narcotics that tranquilize rebellious inclinations through “a leisured and luxurious illusion.” She likewise chided the churches for being “singularly silent on the subject of board-rooms,” and supported co-religionists who were more subversive of industrialism, especially the distributist-sympathizers at fellow Anglo-Catholic Maurice Reckitt’s Christendom. Alongside these other romantic public moralists, Sayers urged a radical reconstruction of consciousness by replacing technocratic theories of work with subcreative conceptions of labor. As she concluded in Begin Here, “Creative Man” should be the nucleus of an alternative modernity. Wade hence judges that in propounding “her own vision of society,” Sayers was a “stealthy radical in the eye of an ideological storm.”
Indeed, Sayers resisted all ideological thinking, even when it had a Christian mien. Although affirming that “religion ought to be in everything one does,” Sayers nevertheless insisted fervently on respect for intellectual and artistic integrity. Elaborating on the Thomistic distinction between ars and prudentia, she argued that a worker must “serve the work” by making something well according to the conventions of its genre, without regard for pleasing a patron or proselytizing an audience. Instead of trying to “fit a doctrine,” she contended, a dramatist should “not bother about the parson and religion” but rather “give people a good play.” In so upholding the “autonomy of technique,” Sayers hoped to supply inoculation against any sort of propaganda, political or religious, declaring famously that “the only Christian work is good work well done.” Yet she was aware that this defense of aesthetic integrity could slide into intellectual pride, distinguishing in The Zeal of Thy House the perfection of the work from the imperfection of the worker: “The work is sound, Lord God, no rottenness there—/Only in me….”
Sayers’s avowal of the holy dignity of labor bred belief in what Christopher Dawson called “the ethics of vocation.” In Sayers’s mind, people ought to seek their “proper job,” the task for which their unique talents best equip them. This functionalist understanding of labor was another contravention of industrial capitalism, as it fostered a differentiation of work and employment. Sayers counseled her readers to conceive of and select their occupation primarily as an expression of their subcreative essence as opposed to a mercenary means of earning a livelihood. These norms shaped an ambivalence about feminism. Sayers did excoriate perceived hindrances to men and women “meeting on equal terms” and denials of “useful and interesting work” to interwar “surplus women,” bemoaning conventional gender prejudices in an archly entitled essay, “Are Women Human?” But nor was she a stereotypical “new woman” who valorized a career. Instead, as depicted subtly in Gaudy Night, she felt that the choice of domesticity, professional life, or a blend of the two, should be left to each individual woman (or man) based on her (his) singular gifts. Ultimately, Sayers viewed the human person fundamentally as homo faber rather than as vir or femina.
Exhuming Dorothy L. Sayers’s widespread bequests to modern literature and thought uncovers a creative mind that molded precocious discourses, revitalized venerable teachings and texts, and interrogated her epoch’s prevalent ideals and institutions while not sparing her own faith and church from this strict scrutiny. Her vigorous originality, uncompromising convictions, and unpopular opinions will not crumble when exposed to the light of a new generation. Rather, recovering Sayers’s oeuvre will illuminate an innovative imagination, a textured reason, and an angular orthodoxy that provided a provocative Christian counterstatement to regnant mores, one rooted in a radical reconsideration of the sanctity of good work. Undertaking this “noble daring” is therefore the duty of the “word-lovers” who (as Tolkien put it) “revive the vanished voices of makers.”
Adam Schwartz is the author of The Third Spring: G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones (2005; 2012). A professor of history at Christendom College, his scholarship is in the Catholic literary revival and the Inklings.
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