Dorothy Sayers Part III

Some years into Dorothy’s marriage, Mac’s health and psychological problems began to make him very difficult to live with.   He was getting older and his physical ailments made him bad tempered and by now, Dorothy  was working extremely hard, earning a comfortable living with her writing.  Eventually she gave her up her day job, in advertising, but took on more writing commitments and she began also to write plays.  She overworked, but was still trying to be a good wife, putting up with Mac's moods, cheering him up and keeping him in comfort now that he was no longer able to work.  But their relationship deteriorated to the point where she considered leaving him.
In the end, after thinking things over, she decided to stay in her marriage, but it was clearly a compromise with her looking after him, rather than a close relationship.  She concentrated more on her work, and spending time with friends in the same line of writing.  She was writing longer and more “novelistic” works, and eventually she abandoned detective fiction and Lord Peter, in favour of translating Dante’s works into English, and writing many plays on religious themes. 
She became more involved in church work, discussing theology with friends who were also religious, and she became a church warden in St Anne’s Church Soho, which provided a religious refuge for “intelligent and unorthodox” people who were interested in Christianity.
Her later life was not in personal terms all that happy.  She tried to be a good mother to her son.  Mac finally legally adopted him and Dorothy while she did not take him into her home, spent time with him and watched over his upbringing and education.   She was able to send him to a good school and he went to Oxford.  

Eventually he found out that she was his natural mother, and there was some strain in their relationship.   They remained in contact but were not very close. 
Mac died in 1950, and Dorothy sincerely mourned him but their marriage had not overall been a great success.  As a widow, she devoted herself to her work all the more.  
She had grown plump since her marriage and as she grew older, she enjoyed food all the more.  She smoked, she never tried to diet and gradually grew very heavy, and it impacted on her health.  She overworked, and pushed herself too hard.   Just before Christmas 1957 she went up to London from her home in Essex, to do Christmas shopping and see her own portrait in the National Gallery.  
On coming home, she seems to have had a coronary thrombosis, and was found dead the next day.   It was only after her death that most of her friends found that she had a son… she had kept her secret well.

I’ve always liked Sayers’ works, and read all the Peter novels as a teenager.  Now I admit that I find some of them rather too snobbish, and I find Harriet Vane, the detective story writer whom Peter falls in love with and marries, a tiresome figure.  Sayers was accused of snobbery and anti-Semitism.  Her first novel, Whose Body, has as victim  a Jewish financier who is kindly portrayed, but there are occasional remarks in her books which betray a somewhat anti-Semitic frame of mind.

Some critics accused her of being “over literary” and of making attempts to “write a real novel” rather than a crime story but not being very good at it.  She was accused of confusing a “fancy literary” writing style, with literary talent.  Still others have attacked her later works, particularly her translation of Dante.
But I think that the books speak for themselves.  I still enjoy many of them - including her works on religion and feminism…Her Peter novels are still in print and read by millions.  Some of the novels have been made into TV serials.  Ian Carmichael played Lord Peter In the earlier adaptations in the 1970s. He was a very keen fan and tried his best to get all the novels made into TV shows, but only the pre Harriet novels were done. In the late 1980s, another set of the later novels were adapted, with as Edward Petherbridge as Peter and Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane.  However the final novel Busman’s Honeymoon, while it was made into a film, has never been seen in a TV version.
Jill Paton Walsh has written 4 “post Sayers” Wimsey novels, with the approval of the Sayers estate and these have met with some approval from fans.  Two of them were based on Sayers’ writings, particularly her plan for a novel in 1937. She had started one, to be called “Thrones Dominations” but did not complete it.  Walsh finished it and then wrote 3 more, “Presumption of Death”, “The Attenbury Emeralds “(based on Peter’s first detective case) and “The Late Scholar” set in an Oxford college.