Dorothy Sayers Part I

Dorothy L Sayers, translator, writer, poet and detective story writer, was born in Oxford in 1893. Her father, Henry Sayers, was a Church of England clergyman who encouraged his only child to develop her great gifts of intelligence and imagination. She grew up in the Fenlands, when her father went to a parish there, and was very much isolated from children of her own class. She was mostly in company with adults, who fostered her tendency to be proud of her own cleverness, priggish and a little intolerant of others. She loved music and reading.. and clearly was a child who would benefit from a good education. As a girl, she was sent to a good boarding school, in Salisbury, to prepare her for the Oxford exams, and she hoped to have a career -. When World War One broke out, she toyed with the idea of doing war work, but instead remained in college. She graduated with First class Honours, but at that time women were not allowed to take their degrees. After college, she worked briefly as a teacher. She found children hard to relate to and she felt that her brain would “get rusty” from working at this level. She returned to Oxford preferring to work in publishing than to stay as a teacher. She became an apprentice with Blackwell Press (Now a very famous publishers). She stayed in Blackwells for about 2 years. However, while she enjoyed working in Oxford, she fell in love with Eric Whelpton, a young man who had been injured in World War One. He was friendly with her but did not return her love. Working in publishing became unsatisfying when Blackwell’s took to publishing textbooks. She had continued to write poetry and had some published. She also translated French poetry and kept up her intellectual interests. Eric Whelpton had set up a scheme for a school in France where English boys could go to learn French. Dorothy went to France with him as his secretary and organiser. She enjoyed the work and the French atmosphere. All her life, she was to see France as a place of sophistication and charm. The secretarial work was light and she read many detective stories, soaking up information that would help her to create her own detective. She wanted to write a detective story because “that was where the money was". Her relationship with Whelpton did not progress beyond friendship. He had become seriously involved with another woman. Dorothy tried teaching again, and she got some freelance work, doing translations of documents, while living in London. She lived in Bloomsbury. She was herself naturally conservative minded, but she mixed with the Bohemian and left wing set there at times. Then she fell in love with another writer, John Cournos, a young man some years her senior, of Russian extraction. He refused to marry her, saying he didn’t believe in conventional marriage. Dorothy was soon deeply in love with him and tried to persuade him to change his mind. He rather exploited her affection, staying in her flat while she was away, and coming round for meals. But the relationship was not going anywhere. He decided to go to the USA, to publicise his books there, and by now Dorothy realised that she had to break up with him. On the rebound, she entered into a light-hearted affair with a young man who was not intellectually minded, who sold motors for a living. She was writing her first “Lord Peter” novel, “Whose Body”. She then secured a job in advertising, which she enjoyed and had a talent for, and which was a new field for women at the time.