Dorothy Sayers Part I

Dorothy L Sayers, translator, writer, poet and detective story writer, was born in Oxford in 1893.  Her father 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, 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, to prepare her for the Oxford exams, and she hoped to have a career - at a time when it was not so common for middle class girls who mostly returned home after schooling to "help Mother" and to find a husband.   She was something of a misfit at boarding school, being fonder of her studies and music and the drama than games, but she was reasonably happy and entered Oxford in 1912.   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 but disliked the work. 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.  She was to learn the job, from the ground up, and she lived in the city for 2 years.  However, while she enjoyed working in Oxford, in the academic atmosphere, 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 mainly textbooks and Dorothy had no outlet for her creativity and she was unhappy about Whelpton's lack of interest.  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 however did not progress beyond friendship and after a time, she returned to England to try and find work there. Whelpton had by then become seriously involved with another woman.  

Dorothy then  tried teaching again, and made a bare living doing translations. She tried her hand at writing, and published some poetry, but the struggle to earn a living was paramount.  She lived in Bloomsbury and while she was herself naturally  conservative minded she mixed with the Bohemian and left wing set there at times.   But life was difficult and she almost gave up on living in London, and taking a permanent teaching job...
Mixing with people in Bohemian London, 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 that 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 and after some time she broke up  with him.  He went back to America and 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.  (Cournous would later become the model for Philip Boyes, a character in her novel, Strong Poison).

She was writing her first “Lord Peter” novel at this stage “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.