Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul by Barbara Reynolds

Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul is a 1993 biography written by Sayers’ friend Barbara Reynolds. Reynolds, a Dante scholar who met Sayers through letters when the latter was working on her translation of The Divine Comedy, wanted to write a biography that reflected the woman she had known – the implication being, of course, that previous biographies didn’t. Because her concern was to let Dorothy Sayers speak for herself as much as possible, the book includes many quotations from her letters and other writings, which was something I really appreciated.

Dorothy L. Sayers (best known for her Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, but was also an essayist, translator and playwright) lived in interesting times – as the Chinese curse goes, yes – and that’s part of this biography’s appeal. She grew up in late Victorian/Edwardian England, she experienced the Great War as a young woman, and she lived to see yet another world war before her death. One of the things that appeals to me about biographies, I begin to realise, is the fact that they give readers the opportunity to experience history on a personal level – as Virginia Nicholson put it, “to touch, to taste, if possible to smell the lives of people from the past (…); to feel [we] could have known them.”

Reynolds tells us about Sayers’ idyllic country childhood; about her love for literature and the theatre, which began when she was very young; about her time at Oxford and her strong ties to this city; about her intense friendships and her first love; about her attempts to train as a WWI nurse; about her short-lived career as a teacher; and finally about her writing, of course. There’s somewhat of a focus on how certain events in Sayers’ life could have impacted her writing, but the tone of the book doesn’t actually feel very speculative at all. Reynolds very much avoids using the novels as a primary source to trace their authors’ psychological profile. Most of all, she seems to truly respect and know the woman she’s writing about it – which makes sense, as Sayers was someone she knew and loved.

There was, however, one thing that let me down quite a bit. Reynolds clearly makes an effort to present Sayers in a multifaceted manner – she focuses on how she experienced faith, on her relationship with her family and friends, on her love life, on her various intellectual interests, on what writing meant to her, and so on. But there isn’t a single mention of how Sayers felt about gender. This didn’t disappoint me because I expect everything to be about gender or feminism; it’s simply that, reading Sayers’ work, it’s quite clear that this was indeed a concern of hers, and sadly Reynolds almost seems to go out of her way to avoid anything pertaining to the f-word.

Gender issues are not only obvious in her writing, but it also seems clear that her life gave her plenty of opportunities to consider them. For example, in Strong Poison, people were inclined to suspect Harriet Vane all the more because she was a disreputable woman (i.e., she had lived with a man she wasn’t married to). Likewise, Sayers was put in an The Odd Women-esque situation by her first lover, who attempted to “test” her loyalty and see how far she was willing to go for him (I’d explain this in more detail, but I want to make you curious). In addition to this, she became a single mother in the 1920’s. This was a fact she kept hidden from her own parents for the rest of their lives, as well as from most of the people she knew. A situation like this would surely encourage even a much less perceptive and intelligent woman to think about sexual double standards and how frail a woman’s reputation really was.

Then there’s the wonderful Gaudy Night: Reynolds says that the theme of this novel is “the importance of intellectual integrity”, and while this is true enough, it would take some serious effort to deny that gender is at least as important a theme. Yet somehow Reynolds manages to write about how Dorothy Sayers was part of the first group of Oxford women students to ever be given a degree (and how this didn’t please everyone) without acknowledging the gender issues involved at all.

The one thing Barbara Reynolds does say is the following, when discussing one of Sayers’ plays: “It has been interpreted as a feminist track (mistakenly in my view) for the reason that the women characters get the better of a somewhat ineffectual man. Dorothy was never a feminist and said so clearly more than once.” She then goes on to justify why her friend clearly wasn’t a feminist with a paraphrase of what Sayers says in her essay “Are Women Human?” (a work whose existence Reynolds otherwise ignores): men and women are really not all that different, and therefore there can’t be anything specifically “feminine” about her work. What a novel idea for feminists everywhere.

Sarcasm aside, the faint hostility and the deep ignorance behind this statement probably go a long way towards explaining this blatant gap in what is otherwise a comprehensive and satisfying biography. Yes, it’s true that Dorothy Sayers wasn’t a fan of the word “feminism”, but this doesn’t mean there are no feminist themes in her work. I find it a lot more forgiveable that Sayers would misunderstand and thus reject the term in 1936 than that Reynolds would continue to do so in 1993. And there seems to be a misinformed and dismissive arrogance behind the phrase “mistakenly read as feminist” that really disappointed me. Virginia Woolf famously rejected the term too – should we also quit “mistakenly” reading A Room of One’s Own as feminist?

Of course, I fully acknowledge that Barbara Reynolds was under no obligation to consider gender when writing this biography, but I was so hoping that she would. Regardless of how Sayers felt about the term “feminism”, she certainly thought about gender a lot. I suspect that a biographer with different sensibilities could have explored this in very interesting ways. Sadly, I can’t imagine anyone ever being in a better position to do so than Reynolds, who actually knew Sayers, so it’s really a pity that she chose not to.

I want to emphasise that despite having devoted an embarrassing number of paragraphs to my frustration with the absence of the gender angle, I really did enjoy Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul. It confirmed my suspicious that Sayers was someone I would have liked to get to know, even if we wouldn’t always have seen eye to eye. It also made me realise more clearly than ever just how extraordinarily intelligent this woman was, and how impressive her range of intellectual interests. For example, did you know she was working on a Wilkie Collins biography, which sadly remained unfinished at the time of her death? What a pity – I’m sure it would have been an absolute delight to read.

Interesting bits:

The earth in which this spring of fantasy was planted was in great part Dorothy’s own. He [Lord Peter Wimsey] was almost her exact contemporary. He was up at Oxford. He has recreations which she shares: books and music; and she will become knowledgeable about cricket. To equip him as a detective she sets herself to learn about criminology. His bubbling cheerfulness, his habit of literary quotations, his manner of prattling, sometimes wittily, sometimes foolishly, his tendency to burst into song or whistle a passage of Bach, his blithe impetuosity, his mental agility and energy, his untiring capacity to engage in exuberant flights of fancy are all characteristics of his creator.

She indulged a life-long love of fairy-stories and over the years she gradually acquired a collection of the Fairy Books series edited by Andrew Lang. In 1956, she was lacking two out of the twelve and said how much she wished she could obtain them. In June of that year, I was lucky enough to find The Olive Fairy Book in Deighton and Bell’s bookshop in Cambridge and sent it to her as a birthday present. This spurred her Witham bookseller into action and he obtained The Gray Fairy Book for her, to her great delight. “I mark this day with a white stone,” she wrote. (…) “If anyone will tell me a story I will listen,” she once said to me. And indeed her response to storytelling was one of her most enduring and creative characteristics.

This alone makes me think we’d have gotten along.

Dorothy Sayers points out that though detective fiction began with Edgar Allan Poe, crime stories had flourished ever since the story of Jacob and Esau, the tendency in early crime literature being to admire the cleverness of the criminal, as in the tales of Reynard the Fox or the ballads of Robin Hood. The detective-story proper could not develop until public sympathy had veered round to the side of law and order. Much depended, too, on the establishment of effective police organizations. By then, the defender of the weak was no longer the knight errant but the detective – the “latest of the popular heroes, the true successor of Roland and Lancelot”.

I’m not sure how universally true her point about public sympathies veering is, but I thought this was quite an interesting idea anyway.

Have you posted about this book too? Let me know and I’ll be glad to add your link here.)

Also, are you a fan of author biographies? Why or why not? And if you are, what are your favourites? I’ve only ever read biographies of Mary Shelley, Shakespeare and Sayers to date, but I’m beginning to realise that there’s this whole universe of books out there just waiting for me to discover them.