Dorothy Sayers Part II

Dorothy’s work in advertising was the foundation for a later novel, Murder Must Advertise... She was working as a copy writer, a job which she loved at first, and enjoying a good social life. But in the first year of her new job she was also enjoying a successful love affair with Bill White, a motor mechanic. Although it was the Roaring Twenties, when public morality changed dramatically as a result of the War, as a Christian and a clergyman’s daughter, Dorothy’s views on pre-marital sex were not that liberal. She had always hoped to get married rather than be a man's mistress. But she didn't intend her affair with Bill to be a serious one; it was meant to be a pleasant consolation for the misery of her relationship with Cournous. But in 1923, she found out that she was pregnant. It was an accident and a disaster. To have an illegitimate child, for a respectable middle class woman, was a major problem. It wasn't unknown, as single women were beginning to have a sex life... but to become pregnant outside marriage was something that a respectable woman had to conceal. She didn’t want to tell her parents, and then she found that Bill was not single at all.. He was a married man who already had a child with his wife. Mrs White, in an attempt to save her marriage, seems to have approached Dorothy and helped her, by making arrangements for her to conceal her pregnancy and have the baby. She took leave from her job, and gave birth to her son John Antony. When he was born, she asked her cousin Ivy Shrimpton, to look after him. Ivy made a living looking after children, whose parents were not able to care for them. John Antony had a happy home with her…and she was discreet enough to conceal Dorothy’s secret. Dorothy made arrangements for him to have a good education. She went on writing her Lord Peter novels and working in Benson's making enough money to pay for her son’s care. She claimed not to want to do too many “Peter” novels and at times she seems to have wished she could write more serious works. However, her novels were popular and well written, and sold well. In 1926 she married a divorced man Oswald “Mac” Fleming, a journalist, who was several years her senior and a former soldier. Because he was divorced, they had to marry in a registry office. The marriage was happy enough at first. Mac was interested in cooking and helped with her detective stories and also with publicity, for he had PR and journalistic experience. He also agreed to adopt her son. But he didn’t share all her intellectual interests and he had unresolved issues from the War. This had left him with poor health and depression. He became more difficult and his drinking increased. He had arrears of income tax to pay and this increased the financial burden on Dorothy. She worked very hard, producing novels, editing book series for her publisher at night and working in the office by day. Her parents both died a few years after her marriage, and Dorothy helped out other elderly aunts, some of whom had lived with her parents… She often had an aunt sharing the home where she and Mac lived, but he seemed reluctant to take on her son or to adopt him legally. Dorothy’s novels became longer and more serious, while still keeping to the detective story format, but she wanted to write real novels. He evolved from a “silly ass upper class twit” with some resemblance to Bertie Wooster, to a more serious highly intelligent scholar and gentleman.