Sayers' Letters 2

 Dorothy went up to Oxford after she had finished school.  She was highly intelligent, particularly good at languages, and was eager to study.  She loved Oxford, and her letters from there are lively and fun, giving a picture of the University and the life of the young women undergraduates.  She did well at her studies, made a lot of friends and engaged in extracurricular activities.  She often claimed that she did not study much but she did very well, and still took part in rowing, theatricals, playing music and writing.  She and a few friends formed a group called the Mutual Admiration Society, they met to read their writings to each other.. and remained friends after they left college. 

I enjoy her college and working years letters more than anything else she wrote.  She has a talent for describing ordinary life or telling a funny story, and she was so enthusiastic about life that it is a pleasure to read her on life at college, trying to find a job or a flat in London, and even the letters about her unhappy love affairs and then her married life with its ups and downs. 

She had several elderly relatives who lived in Oxford and had a tiresome cousin who kept pestering her to join in Christian social activities. She did not pay much attention to the war, though she had cousins who were in the army, but people in the UK did not know much about what was happening in France and did not talk about it much.  She knew about shell shock, but it was not till later that she married a man who suffered from it, badly, and who had other war induced illnesses. 

When she finished college, she tried to get a job teaching though she did not really like the idea, but most women graduates went into schoolteaching.  She took jobs in various schools, but found them boring, as the children were not as keen on learning as she herself had been and she found it difficult to get down to their level, but she did her best to find permanent work though she soon realised that teaching would "make her brain go rusty".  She still wrote and had some poetry  published but she became nostalgic for Oxford and decided to take on an apprenticeship with Basil Blackwell, the Oxford Publisher.  She enjoyed this more, and told amusing anecdotes about office life, about Basil, and a young clergyman who paid court to her and proposed.   She refused him.