Radix: Well, I really appreciate your willingness to share some of your time and your experience, and possibly some stories about Dorothy Sayers. This particular Radix theme is more on artists, but I found it interesting just getting to know Dorothy Sayers a little bit, and the sad fact is that she’s not known as much as she should be. And that’s going to be a question hopefully you can talk about later on, but maybe just to start out with a little bit, could you tell us why Dorothy Sayers is important, and a little bit about her life?
JL: Sure. Well, I think it’s important to give the context of who she is and where she began. She was born in 1893 in Oxford, England, as the child of an Anglican clergy, who was working at Christ Church Cathedral and the school there. As an only child, she was kind of, I think, precocious, and she was doted upon, and a lot of the information that we have about her early life suggests a child who had a lot of opportunity to be the center of her parents’ attention.
at six years of age, she actually began to study Latin with her dad, which led to her having a passion for language all of her life. And that, I think, is an important context for us, because a lot of her work that she did over the course of her life involved translation of language, and a desire to take what she knew and translate it, or to artistically and creatively use that information in the writing that she ended up doing. So, you know, she was brilliant. She was considered a brilliant student, and she went to Oxford to a women’s college called Somerville College. In 1915, she completed her studies there, but at that time, women were not being granted master’s degrees officially, even though they had the same education, basically, as their male counterparts in Oxford at the time, and it wasn’t until 1920 that she actually received her degree.
So, she began publishing in 1916 with a little book of poetry, which you can still find today, but by 1920, she was actually living in poverty in London. She didn’t see herself as a teacher; she found the academic life kind of boring and unsatisfying.
She really didn’t see herself as a teacher. So, it put her in a kind of difficult situation, because she didn’t really do what was traditional. And this was kind of the story of her life, I think. What would have been traditional for a woman with her education and social position was to go into teaching or become a tutor for children in a wealthy family. And she thought both of those ideas seemed really awful. So she began drafting a detective novel; in 1923, that novel, Whose Body? was published. At the beginning of that time, she also was still struggling to find meaningful work. And she got a job with Benson’s, an advertising firm in London, in the same year that her first novel came out. She was just delighted by that, because she found the work really stimulating and she became a copywriter there. And one of the fun facts about that is her Guinness ad campaign, Guinness beer.
Radix: Right. Okay.
JL: With Guinness, she was the one person who began this amazing ad campaign with a toucan in it, and she wrote a little poem that became famous. And in fact, if you go to the UK now, you can still see this little toucan and some of the lines from the poem in some of their advertising that they use now, like all their souvenirs. And another fun fact is that she made Colman’s Mustard really famous at the time by introducing this whole very class-oriented club, where there were bus ads asking the question, “Is your father in the Mustard Club?” or something like that. And anyways, that campaign ran for seven years, which, in advertising, is a pretty long time.
Radix: Mm-hmm.
JL: Anyway, all that to say that that was kind of her day job, that gave her some financial stability. But there are some quite… you know, we could call them juicy facts about Sayers. Things that, as a woman who later in her life became sort of a public figure who was known for her Christian apologetics and her Christian belief system. She actually had an illegitimate child in 1924. Her son’s name was John, and she was 31 at the time. The man that was the father of the child, actually, it turned out that he was married, but she didn’t know. He’d been hiding that from her. In fact, his wife was the one who helped Dorothy in her desperate time of trying to figure out what to do. So, there’s quite this juicy background to Dorothy Sayers’ life, which was that her only son was born to a man who had essentially lied to her and put her in a really difficult position. And because she was the child of clergy, she really didn’t want them to know.
Radix: Right.
JL: And she really didn’t want her employers to know because she felt that she would lose her position. So this boyfriend, his name was Bill White. His wife actually sequestered Dorothy in the countryside and arranged for her brother, who was a doctor, to help with the birth. Dorothy’s cousin ended up raising John Anthony, and in fact, they kept his true identity as the son of Dorothy Sayers from him until his mother died. She never told him that she was his birth mother, even though she and Mac did legally adopt him. Sayers provided for him financially and arranged for his education, but really never had much time with him, which is a very sad aspect of her life and one that I think she struggled with for a long time.
So that’s one of the things that she did that would have been considered very scandalous at the time. The other was that she ended up marrying a man named Mac Fleming in 1926, who wasn’t an Anglican, which would have been controversial from her parents’ point of view. I believe he was a divorcee as well. But sadly, he’d been really affected by his war service and had shellshock in World War I, so his mental health during the years of their marriage was not that great.
There is quite a lot written about that in her letters to her friends and family, and about the challenges that she faced trying to support herself and her husband, and also this child that she was basically keeping secret. So that kind of shaped all of her life and the books that she began to write these detective novels that she’s probably most familiar or known for, often included war veterans with shellshock as characters. And in fact, she couldn’t help but write about the war because it had shaped so much of her own life, you know, the war was from 1914 to 1918 or 19 or something like that. All the years that she was in college, basically, young men she knew were going off to war and lots of them never returned. So, there was this sort of difficult and sad and traumatic history that she experienced that affected her for the rest of her life because she ended up marrying this man who also had injuries that were, you know, profoundly affecting him.
So, that’s all kind of to frame what her life looked like. I think that from 1923 until about 1936, her main focus was writing detective novels and working in advertising. I think that that’s what made her famous was being in those two realms. People knew of her advertising campaigns. They also knew about her books and she was very successful in that. What changed her life really was when she was asked in 1937 to write a play for the Canterbury Cathedral Festival; they had returned to their roots of having a religious play every year. Dorothy’s name was put forward because they heard that Charles Williams, if you know who Charles Williams is, he is one associated with the Inklings, had raved about her writing and raved about one of her books in particular, which is about church bells. It was called The Nine Tailors, and it was a mystery set in a small town church.
Anyway, she wrote this play, The Zeal of Thy House, and it was a great success, but it had a religious theme, and at the time she hadn’t really done any writing about Christian apologetics. But that play was a kind of a launching pad for her to be asked to write about Christian doctrine, apologetics, and her understanding of dogma and things like that, that she’d never actually talked about publicly before.
Radix: Mm-hmm. Okay.
JL: After that time, there was a whole bunch of other things she did, lots of talks she gave, but by 1949, she actually became absolutely consumed with writing the translation of Dante’s Inferno. Lots of people know of Dante’s Inferno, an extended poem that was written in Italian originally. She actually taught herself Italian so that she could translate it. She made it the focus of her work from 1949 until her death in 1957. So that’s kind of her life in a nutshell. And, you know, there are lots of things that we could talk about in and around all that time. But I think it’s important to recognize that she was an amazingly competent, skilled writer. She wrote in so many different genres from fiction to nonfiction. She wrote poetry. She wrote plays. She did translations. You know, we really, I think, don’t fully grasp the skill and capability of someone like that, who can write with that kind of a broad range of knowledge, skill, and experience.
Radix: I remember hearing someone –– a Lewis scholar –– they actually commented, and this is coming from a Lewis scholar, they said that Dorothy Sayers’ writing was, I think they used the word “better,” more fluid and better-constructed than Lewis’ was, which for a Lewis scholar to say that is actually pretty surprising.
JL: That is surprising. Well, I think what’s great about her writing. And I’m not as familiar with Lewis’ writing. I’ve certainly read some of his writing, but not as much as Sayer’s. And what I find so entertaining about Sayers is her humor. She often has a way of wittily, y, putting things together, and her stories and her little examples are often really humorous and they make you want to read more, which is what I see sometimes in her later writing when she began writing more apologetics.
I feel sometimes that it’s a little less mainstream. It’s not as easy reading if you don’t have a background in apologetics or The Book of Common Prayer, or what would have been kind of common knowledge to a well-educated British person in the early 1900s. You know, if you were that, you could understand what she’s talking about, but I find for myself, as someone who’s not familiar with that in the same way, I find it a little bit harder to access. Whereas her novels, I find them to be such entertaining pieces of writing and the characterization in them is just so fun and interesting. And I think that’s where I began my interest in her was by reading her detective novels.
Radix: Okay. One little side question in terms of her popularity at the time when she was around, I’m assuming that her name was very recognized. Is that accurate?
JL: Oh, yeah, for sure. And especially in the 1940s between, you know, I’d say The Zeal of Thy House, when that production took place, she definitely had become a household name. Everyone in Britain would have known who she was. They would have been familiar with her novels. She’d become quite successful by that time. In fact, when she wrote The Zeal of Thy House, she actually threw herself into everything associated with the production from costumes to rehearsals, like, she just made it her total focus for a short period of time. I think that gave her even more notoriety and that is what led her to doing a lot of public talks.
I think that might have been a more common thing at that time, for someone who is kind of a public figure to give a public talk. People would go and hear her, or Lewis, or other people, and also on the radio. And actually, that book I mentioned, The Man Born to Be King, or maybe I didn’t mention, I’m not sure, she wrote a series of plays for the BBC called The Man Born to Be King, which were about the life of Jesus. And there was lots of controversy around that which is another story, but she ended up with millions of people listening to those radio plays, which were about an hour long and done once a week for twelve weeks before Easter.
And they were performed during World War II. So people saw them as a national call to arms in a sense. Like, she sort of associated Christ’s sacrifice with the sacrifice of soldiers at the time. She gave quite a lot of rousing politically-oriented or war-times talks at that time, also because she had fairly strong views about the importance of fighting against the evil that she saw as part of what was happening during that war.
Radix: And there was also some, some kerfuffle about her kind of turning the biblical language into common slang. And some people were horribly offended at that. That’s accurate. Right?
JL: Absolutely. Yeah. In fact, thousands of people apparently wrote letters to the BBC and even to Winston Churchill to, you know, say how disgusted they were to know that she actually had the nerve to give these slang terms to apostles and this sort of, you know, British –– like, I mean, we have to think about the British hierarchy that was still really prevalent in that system at that time. So the fact that all these disciples were using these slang terms would have been very common to everyday people. And that was her whole point: these are everyday people. Jesus’s disciples were not sort of refined, educated men. They were people just like us, in a sense, is what she wanted people to identify with.
In fact, that’s another example of her translating from the original. She actually translated from the original Greek so that she would get a strong sense of the language at the time and how she could translate that into contemporary language. Yeah, she took a lot of flack for it, but the BBC stood by her, and then when the recordings were actually played, everybody was like, wow, these are amazing.
Radix: Okay.
JL: The other thing that was controversial was that they’d never before had an actual character of Jesus performed like that. That was also considered quite scandalous, that she would actually have Jesus as a character in a play.
Radix: Okay. Okay.
JL: So there were people, especially in the religious or church communities who –– thought she was breaking some taboos that had been long established.
Radix: Interesting. Thanks for that. Thanks.
JL: Yeah, no problem.
Radix: So what interested you in Dorothy Sayers specifically?
JL: Well, it was really a course I took at Regent College here in Vancouver. That’s where I live. And I didn’t really know anything about her and I was interested in doing something, as a summer course. I was introduced to a number of different genres of her writing and the things that interested me the most were her novels and a few of the plays that she wrote, which I thought were brilliant and which don’t get a lot of attention even now. Just Vengeance is one that I found particularly funny and interesting. Then, we looked quite closely at two essays included in a short book called Are Women Human? and I became interested in understanding more about how women’s roles had changed during the First World War; the effect of the war on women’s roles in Britain at the time was always quite interesting to me.
Later, I ended up doing graduate work on World War I and contemporary Canadian novels written during that war, I was really intrigued by how authors were sort of looking at the role of women in World War I, but, you know, contemporary novels looking back to that time. And then I realized, wow, this is kind of like what Sayers was doing, except she was doing it right in that time.
She was actually looking at the domestic lives of women with this variety of characters in her detective novels who are all affected by the war in ways that I’d never seen articulated in quite the same way. And she actually showed a lot of compassion and also strength in bringing their stories to the forefront, rather than focusing all the stories on male characters, which I think would have been more, you know, more common to have male characters be the center of the detective novel. Certainly, she did have Peter Whimsy, who was the central character of her stories, but he often had these women who would come alongside him and actually help with a lot of the work that needed to be done in order to do the detecting. That was kind of what captured my interest. And then when I began teaching, I was interested in including Sayers in the courses that I was teaching. So that’s been a fun process. And it’s just led me down these little rabbit holes of understanding more about her.
Radix: It almost sounds like it could be accurate to say that, in terms of including women in the fiction, that actually could be considered historical fiction. Is that correct?
JL: Yeah, in a sense, I see it that way. The first time I read one of Sayers’s detective novels, I didn’t even pay attention to the historical context. It was a detective novel. You just want to know who did it in the end. You just sort of, it’s like, oh, yeah, this is fun. Oh, yeah, I can see that happening in this historical context, or you’re just interested in the character and the plot. But as I’ve re-read her novels, I’ve recognized, especially because of my interest in war novels, World War I novels in particular, I’ve begun to see a lot more about post-war society in England, and how women were really negatively affected by the impact of the war.
First of all, there weren’t as many men. So the women who had been married suddenly found themselves widows with children to care for and a society around them that didn’t really provide for their needs. You weren’t supposed to work. So you’ve got to somehow care for these children. You know, there was a lot of impact on women, and then for women who were young, there weren’t as many men to actually marry at the time. So people like Sayers were sympathetic to the challenge of how do we survive in this post-war timeframe. I mean, it was the Roaring Twenties, but there were a lot of negative things about the Roaring Twenties, too. There’s poverty and women’s roles at that time were kind of seen as emerging and changing.
And there was a lot of backlash to the change that had come during the war when women were working in the jobs that men traditionally held. Then, as soon as the men came home from war, basically, those women were told, okay, you’ve done your part. Thank you very much. Now it’s time for you to go back home. For many women, that was a really hard reality, especially because going home may have meant going home and living with their parents again, and being supported by their parents because they weren’t able to marry the man that they were engaged to when he went off to war or something like that.
Radix: Mm-hmm.
JL: So yeah, very much an interesting historical context to understand. And I think that, going back to the books now, I have a much greater appreciation for the historical context that she’s talking about.
Radix: Since the issue of her thoughts on women is up right now, do you mind if we talk more about Sayers thoughts on women in general?
JL: Yeah.
Radix: And I especially appreciate, in a previous conversation and at other times, you brought up this historical context and you just touched on it right now. So, anything that comes to mind in terms of her thoughts on women?
JL: Oh, okay. Sure. Well, there’s tons you could say. I’ve written about this a little bit and, and given some talks about it as well. And I think that her views on women are still, for some people, especially in church circles, would still be considered somewhat controversial. One of her views that she really promoted later in her life, after all of these things and struggles she’d gone through, was the idea that women, you know … she goes back to Genesis in The Mind of the Maker, which was one of her earlier books about apologetics and creativity, and the role of God as a maker and how artists are makers. So, she was trying to sort of figure that out.
But anyway, she goes back to Genesis and talks about how male and female, you know, are together the image of God. And in her mind, I would say, you know, we, of course, we always come with our own biases, but I would say what she was kind of coming out of was the Victorian age, where there was this idea of the two spheres, the male sphere and the female sphere, and both genders were expected to act in ways that are appropriate to their sphere. So, there were specific roles for women, and specific roles for men. And really, if you are a godly person, you shouldn’t be deviating from those roles. And that was kind of the Victorian ideal.
But. World War I changed that, and it changed Sayers’ ideas along with it, and I think she saw that women needed to have work, meaningful work, and that a lot of women were happier having work, including herself, as a single woman who had to support herself she didn’t want to rely on her parents to support her. So, she talks at length in a number of different places but the best place, I think, to look at her thoughts about the role of women is in a small little book called Are Women Human? And that book includes a couple of essays, which I think are really important. Are Women Human? asks the question, “are women human beings or not?” And if they are, then they should be treated in the same way as men, as human beings. Men and women are human beings first. They’re not a class of men or women. And she goes on to discriminate between those by using some Greek terms, which I’m not going to go into the detail of, just in the interest of time.
But I think what’s important that comes out of her thinking is that, she basically says that all people, all human beings thrive in doing a vocation, some kind of meaningful work, and that meaningful work is an act of worship to their God. She would certainly say she was a Christian and that the God she’s talking about is a Christian God, and she gives a lot of background to that belief in other things she’s written about work, which was also a really important concept to her. And in fact, the whole idea of the value of work and women working is promoted in her detective novels, because one of the characters in one of her, sort of, the middle of her career books was called Harriet Vane and she was a detective novelist. So, you know, obviously there are connections you can make between Harriet Vane and Dorothy Sayers herself in her own life.
But she did have some mistakes she made. In fact, Harriet is accused of murdering her live-in boyfriend in the novel Strong Poison. So, this character of Harriet Vane becomes almost a type of woman who is successful and self-sufficient, able to support herself and who is living a much different single life than what society at that time in Britain would have seen as, you know, the kind of life a woman should be leading. So, I think that this idea of work and women working is something she develops throughout her writing, and is culminated in a sense in these two essays where she explores the whole idea of whether women actually should be treated as equals to men. Or is it fair, she asks, for women to be always discussed and analyzed according to how they look and whether they’re nurturing enough, or whether they’re, you know, able to cook well enough or those kinds of things that were sort of held up as domestic ideals. And then men, on the other hand, were often looked at as rational and intellectual and able to be put in all these positions of leadership and power because they were male. And she disagreed with that, I think profoundly disagreed with it, because she saw that women needed the same kind of stimulation and desire for vocation in order to thrive in society and in their personal lives.
Radix: Right.
JL: So, I think those were things that were important to her and that she talked about at length in a lot of different ways. Sayers makes this hilarious commentary and I didn’t talk about this yet, but I think it’s important to sort of understand as I read this. Dorothy Sayers was quite unconventional. There’s a volume of stories and information from Somerville College, which was her university, and she’s included in that history.
They talk about how she, you know, wore crazy earrings, and she dressed up as a man and parodied the choir director and she smoked, which was considered a, you know, kind of a controversial thing to do. And she smoked in public, which was even more controversial. And as she got older, she had problems with her hair, because of some illness she had had and so her hair was thinning. So, she just cut it off very short, which was, you know, not conventional in the early part of the twentieth century.
Then she had the nerve to wear trousers, and in fact, there’s a great photograph, which I did send to you that has her wearing what looks like a man’s suit. She’s got kind of a tie loosely tied up and she’s wearing a suit jacket, and she was wearing trousers and she’s smoking a cigarette and she’s got her hair kind of slicked back. Of course, for some people that just suggests really obviously that she might have been a lesbian. And I think, based on the biographies I’ve read, that isn’t really an accurate assessment. I think it reflects her belief that women should be not judged for how they look, how they dress and how they appear. In fact, as she got older, she was criticized for having let her weight go. She worked hard, she sat a lot, and she enjoyed food, and she didn’t really seem to mind that she was heavier than what was accepted among women.
So anyway, I’m going to read this little quote about wearing trousers, which is part of the essay, Are Women Human? I think it really reflects what I like to think of as a Dorothy Sayers viewpoint on all of that. So she says:
Let us take this terrible business — so distressing to the minds of bishops — of the women who go about in trousers. We are asked: “Why do you want to go about in trousers? They are extremely unbecoming to most of you. You only do it to copy the men.” To this we may very properly reply: “It is true that they are unbecoming. Even on men they are remarkably unattractive. But, as you men have discovered for yourselves, they are comfortable, they do not get in the way of one’s activities like skirts and they protect the wearer from draughts about the ankles. As a human being, I like comfort and dislike draughts. If the trousers do not attract you, so much the worse; for the moment I do not want to attract you. I want to enjoy myself as a human being, and why not?
Radix: Right, and when was that written?
JL: That was 1938.
Radix: Oh, 1938. So that’s, that’s even worse than in the fifties. So definitely, she would have annoyed some people.
JL: Oh, yeah. And in fact, when I was doing some research on this, I’ve discovered… I was reading about women in post-war Britain, and right after World War I was finished there, there were, you know, there was so much propaganda in posters, big war posters that were put up all over Britain during and after the war. And there’s this image of a young woman wearing trousers, farming gear really, and they would have identified her as what they called a land girl. These were women who worked on the farms during the war. And the only graphic words written on the poster are: “After the war problems. shall I wear them meaning the trousers, or shall I get married?”[1]
So, I think for Sayers, this whole idea that it was so controversial that you wearing trousers actually suggested that you didn’t want to get married seemed, I would think, kind of ludicrous to all these women. It certainly seems ludicrous to me now in this contemporary society. But I think, you know, this idea that in order to be an eligible partner, or in a marriage, you needed to actually not wear pants or trousers is kind of hard for us to get our heads around in this contemporary time. But for people in the 1920s and early 1930s, it was a question, a social question of how you were going to present yourself. She does go on in that same essay to talk about more things than just that wearing of trousers, but I think that’s a good example of sort of her general dismissal of the idea that women should be judged by what they look like, how many kids they’ve raised and that kind of thing, which, you know, that was a very important part of the social fabric at that time.
Radix: This kind of connects it. If you don’t mind me asking this question now, I think it’s a terrible shame that Sayers isn’t more popular now, especially considering you have people of the Inklings and connected to the Inklings; you know, there’s lots of information about them. There are piles of essays, written books, et cetera, et cetera, but there isn’t that much about Dorothy Sayers. And I think, you know, what is the reason for that? You’ve mentioned previously about the time that she has written in, though, even at that time –– you’ll talk about that. But even now, we would think, surely to goodness, people would find just what you were talking about previously, that would be exciting to talk about, showing she’s thinking ahead of the times. She didn’t do it in a ridiculous way, but she did it enough. She was bold enough to do it. Like, why isn’t she recognized as much as she should be?
JL: Well, I think that’s such a great question because it really points to a lot of things in our contemporary society. You know, we’re beginning to look more and more at women’s contributions in all kinds of different ways that have been overlooked. You know, if you think about the literary canon of the past, there are almost no women even mentioned in that literary canon. When I first studied English literature, the few women that we discussed were Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. And, you know, you’re hard-pressed to really talk about anybody else in the British canon. We certainly never talked about who Dorothy Sayers was at that time. And I think there is a few reasons behind that. Crystal Downing, who’s written a lot about Dorothy Sayers and is probably the most well-known contemporary researcher on Dorothy Sayers, has written recently and published a couple of books in the last ten years that I think are important contributors to understanding more about that question. She addresses that question in her books.
But I think there are a few reasons. I think one is that she was unconventional and so, because of that, sometimes people viewed her with suspicion, you know, maybe they saw her views as being controversial. Perhaps they thought that she was living this unconventional life as the primary provider for her family at a time when that would have been unusual. She was making a living in male-dominated areas, advertising was certainly male-dominated at the time. How she even got the job, I’m not sure. She must have been very charming and she was very witty, which I think were two things that helped her. She also was very well-educated, which, you know; I think the fact that she was one of the first female graduates of Oxford with a master’s degree helped a lot, so why was she ignored?
I think part of it was maybe some of these things that people identified as … you know, first of all, detective novels were maybe kind of considered, like, what we think of as Harlequin romances. Now, you know, they’re kind of like, not serious writing, and she saw them as serious writing. Maybe not at first so much, although she does say in one of her essays that she set out with the idea that she wanted to write more of a novel, and not a conventional detective story. And then she looks back and realizes, it was “conventional to the last degree.”[2] She was writing from what she knew. And that wasn’t very much when she first started. As her writing developed, her detective novels did become more like true novels; they became more complex. The characters were well-rounded, they were much more interesting and complex people, and their inner stories were not cut-and-dried whodunits anymore.
So that’s one thing that happened, but I think, you know, there would have been a certain amount of like, oh, she’s just a detective writer, you know, detective story writer. So what has she really got to say? Then when she became sort of, I would say, considered an apologist, well, there again, she’s in a male-dominated world as a playwright. That was a male-dominated area as well. There are a few exceptions, like … well, let me think. I mean, there are a few writers that were exceptions. Virginia Woolf, for example, was someone who’d written and been successful. Vera Britton was another person who, you know, wrote very well. She also went to Somerville, surprisingly enough, and was a classmate of Sayers at one time. So there were other women who were being successful as writers, but none of them got the kind of acclaim, I don’t think, that their male counterparts did. And that might have just been society in the aftermath of the Victorian age, where the men were the ones of that authority sphere, and they would have been seen as the ones who should be paid attention to.
Radix: Mm-hmm.
JL: And women who chose to defy that or, or maybe… I don’t think she was defiant in what she was doing. I think she was just … She would, from what I can tell, she was doing what she’d always done, which was doing the work she felt called to do, which was writing. She did it to the best of her ability because that was what she believed was important and she was doing it to her commitment to God as an active vocation. Now, she wasn’t someone who would go around calling herself a born-again Christian or an evangelist or a priest or anything like that. She refers to that directly in a couple of letters that she’s written that you can read, but she definitely was seen as an intelligent, capable person who could write about such things.
I think, today, what’s interesting and different, maybe, is that in evangelical circles, there are women writing books. There are women who are having a voice of authority in society who have religious beliefs, especially in the United States. But at the time that Sayers was writing, that would have been a little bit more suspect, or there would have been maybe a little less value placed on her point of view in comparison to some of these other public intellectuals. In Britain, that would have been C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and others who were speaking openly, and were on radio shows and things like that, too. And Sayers, I think, actually, there’s a great quote from a letter she wrote to John Lewis Wren, which I wouldn’t mind reading to you at this point, where she talks about her perspective. She’d always seen herself as a writer, a writer of fiction, and then when she was asked to write a play on a religious topic, she did it to the best of her ability, and she felt that it was a good play. Well, she wasn’t prepared for the success that it brought, and the way that the Christian community began to see her, which was different than how they had seen her in the past.
She says to John Wren-Lewis, who is a British scientist who was kind of interested in her work and had some disagreements with her, but they had a little exchange of letters as Christians who were speaking into the public arena. And she says this, which I think is really telling about where her career kind of went. She says, “I never, so help me God, wanted to get entangled in religious apologetic, or to bear witness for Christ, or to proclaim my faith to the world, or anything of that kind.”[3] She also published an essay called “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged,” where she argued that “whether you believed in Christ or not, it was ridiculous to call the story of the Incarnation and Redemption dull.”[4]That’s how she describes it.
Radix: Okay.
JL: She says “Anyway, from that time on, suppose that hardly a week has gone passed without at least two demands. That I should write or say something on a religious question and life becomes nothing but a desperate struggle to hold on to the rags of one’s integrity”[5]And, for me, I would see that as Sayers’s belief that her writing about theology and apologetics was not what she did best.
She feared writing about those things for the wrong reasons, which was partly, as she described it, encouraging people to follow you and not Christ. So, because she believed that there was a danger for all artists of trying to substitute themselves for God, seeing themselves as this gifted maker who should be listened to and should be an authority, I think that she was nervous about that, and she even acknowledges that the one doctrine that she really has accepted and believed in is the doctrine of sin. Perhaps that’s rooted in the fact that she saw herself as having sinned through this adulterous relationship she had that resulted in a child that she was having to basically hide for her whole life. She acknowledged that sin was part of her life, and that she was not without sin. She knew it.
I think she was afraid at that point. I mean, this is just me hypothesizing, but I would think that she might have felt nervous, based on what she wrote in this letter, anyway, about trying to present herself as a religious authority without the education behind it. She really was just a public figure who happened to be the daughter of a clergy, and who had a classical education. It didn’t really make her an authority on religious topics, but somehow, people saw her as entertaining and interesting, well-spoken and intelligent. So let’s ask her because maybe people will be persuaded that Christianity is a valid point of view. We also have to remember that after World War I, there was a whole movement of anti-God or atheistic thinking that was happening in Britain, which came out of people’s absolute trauma and horror about how many people were killed violently in the war.
So she was speaking into that sort of a society that was grappling with the question of, “where is God in all of this? Where is God when all these people are dying on both sides of this war and what do we do about it? Is it even possible that there is a God that would allow such horrible suffering?”
So religious people, I think, believed that she had some intelligent, believable things to say about these topics, but I think she was always somewhat reluctant. In fact, Crystal Downing calls her the reluctant prophet, in the sense that she found herself in this position of having to speak for Christian apologetics.
She always brought it back to, “I’m talking about doctrine, I’m talking about Dogma. These are not my points of view, necessarily,” she would say, about certain aspects of apologetics. She would say, “this is grounded in the doctrine of the Church of England,” because that’s what she had been trained in and raised in, not just as a child of clergy, but also just because that was the system she was part of.
Radix: You raised the word “prophet,” and in some of the written stuff that you have sent me, her prophetic voice that still remains accurate on things today, such as consumerism, I found fascinating. Do you want to share a little bit more on some of her ideas that are still very applicable for us to listen to today?
JL: Yeah, I’d love to, because they fascinate me too. And I think even reading her novels kind of gives you some aspects of those things that … she grappled with, for example, in Murder Must Advertise.
Radix: Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah.
JL: Yeah, which is about –– apparently it’s modeled after her time in the advertising field. But she talked in that novel about consumerism and the job of an advertiser. Well, what is it? It’s to convince people to buy things they don’t really need.
Radix: Hmm.
JL: And of course, we all know what that’s like, and it’s even worse now because of social media. And I think that she would have lots to say right now. But I think one of the most interesting discussions that she has about cultural issues is her essay, “The Other Six Deadly Sins.” And in this essay, she outlines the problem of sins that are often hidden, such as covetousness, envy, gluttony, and sloth.
There is one of the places where she’s critical of the consumerism that’s part of the progressive nations and that results in, and this is a quote: “…every citizen is urged to consider more, and more complicated, luxuries necessary to his well-being.”[6] And then she points out that machines can only produce goods cheaply when they’re made in large quantities, and they’re often poorer quality, and so consumer spending encourages a higher standard of living, but also encourages attitudes of excess envy, jealousy, and she describes it as “a greedy hankering after goods that they do not really need.”[7]
And this idea of consumerism, when I think about this, it surprises me that it was of such concern to her in the 1940s because I think of it as a really contemporary problem that we have this attitude that we should just throw everything away. You know, we all hear people complain about, well, I just bought myself a new coffee maker and it’s already broken after a year. Like, why don’t they make these things to last?
Radix: Hmm. Mm-hmm.
JL: And I think she actually, in that essay in particular, sort of prophetically addresses the problem of a society, a capitalistic and consumeristic society that focuses so much attention on these sort of harmful desires for more. We’re never satisfied with just having enough. We want to have more. We always want a higher standard of living. We want more things. We want to be able to throw away the things that don’t work or that we’re not happy with anymore. She had a lot of concern about that. And I think that’s an area where she spoke quite eloquently. And it does lead us to questions about environmentalism, because the same kind of idea of, just throwing stuff away and not taking care of the resources that we have comes out of that concern about consumerism. And I think that she was very vocal about that, and she saw it; one of her concerns was that during wartime, all this money and resources were being turned into weaponry, armaments, ammunition, and she said, “what’s going to happen when all of that is finished with? Like, where are we going to put our resources, our time and our attention when all this focus of the war is gone? Will we just keep on this with the same attitude of we need to have factories and we need to keep churning out more goods?” And I think, well, obviously, in our society now, we see this. We’ve got dollar stores where you can buy things that are made in large quantities that really are useless. Not all things that they sell are useless, but, how many spatulas do I need in my kitchen? Those questions were just not part of society. I didn’t think those were so much a part of society, but here she was talking about that. In the early 1940s, late 1930s. I think that’s pretty prophetic.
Radix: Yes, because there’s been some work that was done, Ents, Elves and Eriador. I think it was Matthew Dickerson wrote that with Evans … And there’s been some work, a little bit of work lately on Chesterton, you know, so there’s interest in the Inklings being prophetic in terms of environmentalism. I hope that someone does something on Dorothy Sayers on that. Maybe even a master’s thesis, or a Ph.D., or a good book. At least, that sounds very called for.
JL: Yeah. I think that would be really interesting because it would fit with so much about what she had to say about vocation. And I mean, the thing that I see, a primary theme throughout all the work that she did, is this idea of work and the value of having a sense of real commitment to a vocation. I think she had a lot to say about how that permeates all of life. If you believe in a vocation, maybe you’re going to be less likely to produce a bunch of stuff that’s useless. It’s a different way of thinking about what’s the value of something. And then as an artist, I think she would consider herself an artist.
She also believed that it was. important for her to express those ideas in a way that was meaningful to people and that she could help them to see the human folly alongside the potential for human greatness. You know, I don’t think she shied away from that idea either– that we could have a meaningful life that included valuable work. And in fact, I think she says something about, you know, you end up being a nuisance to the world if you don’t have something meaningful to contribute.
Radix: Yes.
JL: And that, you know, that might be controversial today. We, you know, have to be careful when we make assumptions about, well, what does that really mean?
But I think it would be very interesting to consider how she might speak into environmentalism. I don’t think she actually ever really spoke directly to environmentalism. When I make that link, I think it’s more just that whole relation to consumerism. And she was quite interested in the change from the medieval time frame where cottage industry, where women and men worked alongside each other in family businesses from the home, and how the industrial revolution changed all of that and women became kind of stuck at home. And men became, you know, the managers of factories, and they took on roles outside the home, which left women at home, primarily looking after home and hearth, but without the same sense of responsibility and vocation that they might have had.
She makes some really funny comment about how not everybody wants to have ten children anymore. And so, being back at home, minding the fire, you know, it’s doesn’t look the same now as what it might have looked like in the 1600s for a woman to be working alongside her husband. In a family business now, obviously, things have changed. There are lots of women working from home doing family businesses now and in all kinds of creative ways. And so, in that sense, I don’t know if she would have foreseen that kind of change that has come about in society. But I think she would celebrate it.
I think she would see that as a positive change.
Radix: A favorite question of mine to ask is and you can speak for yourself or for Dorothy Sayers or for both, but a favorite question of mine to ask is, if you are able to have all the pastors in a room, and you got to speak to them, and they had to listen to you and they had to listen to you with a smile on their face, because if people are smiling, they’re a little bit more receptive, what would you want to, or what do you think Dorothy Sayers would want to tell them?
JL: No, that’s it. I love that question. And I do have a few thoughts on that. I think I’d go back to Sayers’ essay, “The Human Not Quite Human,” which she wrote in 1946, and in the opening paragraph of that essay, she argues that the church has done a poor job of addressing the question of women’s equality, and she believes it’s time for the church to be told, and she uses these two words, “plainly,” and even “brutally,” that women are more like men than anything else in the world, and they are human beings. And then she follows that up with a bunch of funny but also serious examples of the ways in which women are treated as inferior to men, in particular in religious circles, and the ways women are sexualized. In particular, the ways that they are talked about, the ways they are criticized for how they look, for the clothes they wear, how they parent, things like that, and the expectations put upon them.
She describes the fact that women are expected to be nurturers, and men really aren’t, you know, and because that expectation is there that women are nurturers… Well, of course, they’re going to be good moms and good parents to their children, good wives to their husbands, things like that. And I think, you know, the church certainly…
I, as someone growing up in the 1980s, and as a young mom, I felt the pressure of, you know, those things like you’ve got to look good. You’ve got to, you know, take good care of your kids. You’ve got to take good care of your families. You’ve got to represent your spouse well. And I don’t remember that same kind of conversation happening for my husband. There was an expectation that he would provide for us, that he’d be the authority in the home and that kind of thing. And I think that for the church today, as we continue to struggle with how we view women in the church, I think that, looking at some of what Sayers has to say about the importance of seeing the value of what women can contribute to society and to recognize them for that value beyond mothering, or beyond very prescribed roles, that maybe we idealize somewhat in the church. And, let’s be honest, in a society that is often influenced by social media, and I’m thinking of Instagram where you come on, you can see anything on Instagram, these people cooking amazing meals, having amazing homes, going on amazing trips and travel and stuff like that, we can become quite idealistic and unrealistic about what it means to be a contributing person in society. And I think that she would have a lot to say about that in terms of the relationship between women in the church.
And for me, this latest decision by the Southern Baptist Convention, which you and I’ve talked a little bit about already, where they quote, that they affirm, appoint or employ only men as any kind of pastor or elder. And then they mandated congregations like Saddleback Church to expel their women pastors because of this mandate that had been accepted. You know, I think that that kind of decision that requires women to take themselves out of what might be seen as a very relevant vocation, a God-given vocation, those are things that I think we have to be careful about. I mean, regardless of what I think about whether or not that was a good mandate to make, I think, as someone who works in a position in a Christian university, where I am in authority in the classroom over my students, I teach them things and somehow to think. Well, I’m not a pastor and I’m not teaching them about theology, but we certainly talk about theological ideas and religious discussion. We talk about all kinds of things. You know, it kind of asks the question about, “if God created men and women in His image, why this sort of strong division of labor in a sense, you know, like, what is that about? And is that really the biblical view? Where do we stand on that?”
I think those are very good questions. And I think that Sayers would be against this argument that there are complementary roles, as opposed to egalitarian ones, for men and women. I think she would be quite opposed to that because she spoke at length, even just from a practical point of view about … you know, I’m just trying to think … yeah, she says in one of those essays, she says it’s only under the stress of war that we’re ready to admit that the person who does the job is the person best fitted to do it. And what she was talking about is this idea that, before the war, women were not admitted into certain kinds of jobs, but then when the job required that women be involved, well, then suddenly they’re the best person to do the job. Oh, but we’re not going to pay them quite as much. And we’re going to tell them at the end that they can’t do that job anymore, but for the most part, right now, we need you. And I think she’s pointing to something that a lot of women are struggling with, Christian, non-Christian women in our society, which is if I’m the best person in the room for the job, based on my experience, my qualifications, wouldn’t that suggest God’s direction and guidance and, you know, gifting for me to be able to work in that field?
Those are hard questions in the church these days. Maybe it’s been, you know, hard questions in the church for a long time, but I think that that’s something that’s worth talking about. And I feel that there are many young women who are looking for a sense of calling. They want to make a contribution in the world. They have great skills. They have great ideas. They have experience and knowledge and equipping, and I just don’t really understand why they shouldn’t have similar opportunities to serve God where they feel God is calling them to. And so, yeah, that’s, I guess that’s what I’d like to say.
Radix: Yeah. This is absolutely, inconceivably wicked, villainous, and pernicious of some of the attitudes. And it was interesting. I talked to a fairly well-read friend of mine, and I brought up this issue of egalitarianism versus complementarianism. And because I have friends in both camps ––
JL: Yeah, me too.
Radix: –– and people are people, so you’ll have people who will, you know, they’ll believe totally in complementarianism and then they have different ideas and it looks different, but I was telling this to my modern-minded friend, and I said from what I have seen, complementarianism, generally speaking … I mean, sure, they give lip-service to the fact that people are different and we’re differently gifted, but then it turns out that the giftedness of women happened to be something that seems to be, at least from what I see, a lot less, you have to stay in certain lanes that you can never get out of. So help you God.
JL: Yeah.
Radix: And she said to me, “I never saw it like that. I always saw it in terms of, you know, me coming from a feminine background, having a feminine understanding of things, and that that’s a benefit.” And I said, “Yeah, that’s true. And I totally agree with that. But don’t you find that you have been limited especially by men in what you can actually express yourself in?” And she said, “Not really.” And I said, “Well, it probably depends on what kind of church background you came from, because I know people who actually absolutely have been curtailed and pinioned by this complementarianism idea that for some it can sound nice, but then it turns out to be a lot of rot.”
JL: Yeah.
Radix: So, it would be nice, it seems, like in a situation like this, I wish, because men do have more positions of authority. They need to be the ones who get out and start speaking on women’s behalf about this.
JL: Yeah.
Radix: Like with the SBC thing. My goodness, there should be shrieks of rage and horror, but especially coming from the men, because at this point, the women are in a position where they can’t scream as much because if they do, their volumes automatically turned down, whereas the men, they have the volume.
So, I mean, there should be much more that’s said about this. It’s a hugely important issue, and I hope it gets a lot more air time. And thank you for bringing this up, and yeah, how exactly it can be done. And I mean, things have to be done tastefully, and, you know, it’s not going to be something that it’s not going to change overnight, but you know what, if it takes more than twenty or thirty years, that’s kind of starting to be a problem. Like, let’s figure out what a good timeline is, and then let’s get to it.
JL: I think it’s not just in the church that these things are happening. It’s kind of society-wide, culturally, there are lots of examples you could probably give of how women often want to press through the glass ceiling, but then the realities of what that would cost them is actually, you know, well, “gee, I can’t have kids then,” or “gee, I can’t take a year off in order to have maternity leave, because I have to keep working. I can’t afford the time that it requires away from my career.” And I think those are questions that are tough ones. So, it doesn’t surprise me that the church is grappling with them.
And I think, you know, to get back to Dorothy Sayers, one of the things that enabled her to do what she was doing was the fact that her cousin was raising her child. Two, she was single until her thirties in a time when most women would have been married by their twenties. So, she had ten years of producing work that made her a living, a good living, and eventually because of her husband’s health issues, she became focused on making enough money to support him and her son.
She was motivated to take on these other jobs and, she didn’t write the play for the Canterbury Cathedral for nothing. They paid her to do those things, and she had the opportunity to do them partly because she refused to live a conventional life in a sense, whether that was out of self-preservation or whether it was because she thought that it wasn’t a very positive environment to bring a child into. So I think, you know, from what I’ve read in a couple of her biographies, her husband could be violent. He was difficult. She did a lot of massaging of the day in order to keep him from getting upset.
So, she may at one point even have just decided, “You know what? It’s not safe for a child to be here, so I’m just going to continue to work hard, so I can pay my cousin to raise my son.” That gave her a certain amount of flexibility and opportunity that she might not have had had she lived a more sort of, let’s call conventional life of, “Well, I finished my university. Now I’m going to become a teacher and then I’m going to get married,” and in fact, that wasn’t until 1935. There was some kind of an ordinance or something that said that, if you were a teacher and you got married, you had to give up your job because you are now married. And you know, it’s like, okay, so she wouldn’t have even been able to do those things that she did, if she’d have followed a sort of traditional path.
And I find that all very, very fascinating, just looking at society today, and seeing what kinds of comparable restrictions do we have. Well, here’s one right here. Women may not be a pastor or elder, and I was reading a little bit more about it, and it was talking about the fact that women could teach other women theology, but they couldn’t teach any man theology. And I just found that in itself, like, kind of illogical. Well, if a man can teach it, why can’t a woman teach the same content? I’m a teacher. I should be able to teach the content, whether it’s to men or women. Like, it’s just a different way of thinking to say, “no, you know, a woman cannot teach the same material to theology students that a man can.” I just don’t understand that.
Radix: It seems blasphemously heretical, just from a reasonable point of view, just like what you were saying. And I mean, if we look back at some of the… there’s not as many of them, but there is some of them. So, whether it’s in the Catholic tradition or the Anglican tradition, something like Evelyn Underhill, or I mean, there are lots of others. So what, we should just burn their books, or we just shouldn’t read them because how dare we subject ourselves to a woman. Like, that’s just, really, it’s horribly regressive. And what does that look like to the world? Like for the people who, you know, for the more progressive, angry leftist types who look at the SPC stuff. I mean, what does that say about Christianity? Good Lord in heaven!
JL: Oh, I know. Actually, Crystal Downing has a great little section in her book[8] where she talks about –– I think it’s Downing –– she talks about how she encountered a story that was told where, you know, three people standing in the line at the grocery store and the people weren’t appalled by the fact that the storyteller talked about someone picking their nose and someone, you know, farting or something. No, what really offended them was that the person was a born-again Christian. And this kind of struck her as, “Oh my goodness, what’s this all about?” And she talked to some of her clergy friends and said, “You know, what is this?” And they said, “Yeah, well, this is the reality: born-again Christians in our society are seen as people who are trying to shove their point of view down your throat. And it’s not seen in a very positive light anymore.”
she goes on to talk about the term “born-again Christian” and where it came from and whether or not Jesus even used the term. And it’s a great little, you know, similar kind of conversation that we’re having here, where she points out, you know, and she’s a professor in a Christian university too. So, you know, she’s achieved a certain level of success in her field and is living out the vocation that she feels called to do.
And I think this is what God calls us to do, is to do what we believe, we’re doing the work that we have opportunity to do to the best of our abilities. And yes, we’re sinful people. Yes, we could do better, I suppose. But there’s just a lot of questions, I think, that get raised by this kind of very negative perception that society is getting of the Christian community, of being these sort of ultra-conservative, very right-wing people that don’t necessarily represent the whole group. And I think that’s part of the challenge of social media too, is that we have a lot more polarization. Of course, that’s a really interesting topic for today too. All the polarization that comes out of social media and the way it all works and how we’re affected by it and all of that stuff. So, yeah, I find that all very interesting. I wonder sometimes what would Sayers say about that?
Radix: Right, right. Well, first of all, thank you very, very much for this. I really, really enjoyed this, and a lot of different things have come up… the quotes, the ideas, and maybe it’s more interesting for me because I don’t know enough. Well, again, to make the point, not nearly enough people know about Dorothy Sayers. So again, thank you for helping to increase the awareness of her. I wonder, just as a closing, a thought of yours for people who don’t know that much, who are just, you know, they’re kind of uninitiated. Are there any books of Sayers that you would recommend? And you’ve mentioned some already, and any other resources.
So you’ve mentioned Crystal Downing, and I’m going to put some links in at the bottom of the page here. But is there anything that you could suggest for people who are kind of uninitiated to start reading?
JL: Yeah, absolutely. I’d love to recommend some as far as her detective novels go. I think that what some people call her “Whimsy-Vane Quartet,” which is the books that have Peter Whimsy and Harriet Vane as the main characters. There are four of them: Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night, and Busman’s Holiday. Those four, I think, represent some of the most complex of the novels that she wrote, and I think they have a lot of great characters. They’re funny, and they really represent her style.
And you can also see some of those on, I think, well, I don’t know how available they are right this minute, but I know I’ve watched some of them on YouTube. There are recordings that the BBC did, like short little movies that you can watch of them. So that’s another way to access the Peter Wimsy stories. And they’re quite fun.
I mentioned Are Women Human? That’s a little book published by Eerdmans, and it’s easy to access. I’d highly recommend that for anybody who’s interested in her thoughts about gender roles and the arguments you and I have been talking about today. The Man Born to be King is the twelve-play cycle that I mentioned already. C. S. Lewis said he read it every Easter and looked forward to it because it was so profoundly moving and interesting. Someone told me recently that you can actually listen to those twelve plays as they were performed on the BBC, or some of them, maybe not all of them, but on Audible. I haven’t-double checked about that, but that’s something people could check out if they’re interested. It’s particularly meaningful in the time of Lent because they cover the period from Christmas, his birth, all the way to the Resurrection.
Radix: Ah. Huh.
JL: As far as her essays go, I think one of her best collections is called Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine. And that particular one contains several of the essays I’ve already mentioned today: “The Other Six Deadly Sins,” “Why Work,” and quite a few others, “That Creative Mind,” which is about creativity. And we didn’t really get a chance to talk about that too much, but those are all great ones to start if you’re interested in what she had to say about theology, doctrine and dogma. That’s a great one that was published in 2004. And I think that might be Eerdmans’s too, or it doesn’t matter.
Anyways, Mind of the Maker is one that we talked about briefly here today too. And I’d say that one’s really great if you’re interested in philosophy, theology, and creativity. I’ve heard many people describe it as one of their favorite works by Sayers and well worth the digging. So that’s something I always think is worth introducing yourself to if you’re interested in her theological approach to art, because she talks about writing in the context of the Trinitarian view of Christianity.
As far as biographies go, I think there are two that are worth taking a look at. The very first biography that included the full information about her son John is written by James Brabazon, and it’s called Dorothy Sayers: The Life of a Courageous Woman. And a lot of people, scholars especially, talk about this volume because it was the first time that we saw a really full picture of her true life and her son actually gave permission for him to read all her letters and to access all the materials. This was published in 1981 and she died in 1957. And when she died, very few people knew that she had a son. And she kept all of that under wraps for a really long time.
The second is by her friend, Barbara Reynolds, who actually edited her volume of Sayers’ letters. And she completed Sayers’ translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. She finished it because Sayers was just about finished, but she died suddenly. I think it was a heart attack. She died in 1957 and Barbara Reynolds wrote Dorothy Sayers: Her Life and Soul, which I think as her friend is a really compassionate and quite a well-rounded, feminine perspective on Dorothy Sayers. You know, James Brabazon brought a lot of facts to life, which I think was really important. But I think Reynolds actually approaches it more as, you know, “Hey, this is a woman’s experience, and I can relate to that in that sense.”
Radix: Hm.
JL: I mentioned Crystal Downing’s a couple of times. Her most recent book is called Subversive Christ Culture and the Shocking Dorothy L. Sayers. And if anyone is interested in sort of a Christian understanding of who she was in the context of her culture, I think that’s a really great read, well worth taking on and it’s really recent, 2020.
Radix: Right, right.
JL: So, those would be the ones that are my first ones. I would say there’s been quite a lot written over the years and, you know, there’s quite a stack of books now that have been written. There was quite a lot of interest in her work at the 100 years since her birth kind of mark, there was a lot of quite a few books that were published in the 1980s, then again in the 1990s. And then I think there wasn’t very much published between sort of 1995 and 2015. So there has been sort of some interest that’s been piqued. I do think one of the challenges for Sayers’ work to be appreciated is that feminists might look at her as a Christian, someone who’s kind of not taken feminism far enough, that she may be… and she even identified herself as not a feminist. She says that quite clearly in one of her essays, that she doesn’t see herself as a feminist. And I think because of that, it’s possible that feminists would ignore her work in some respects, because there’s so much of it that has a spiritual or religious nature to it. And in the Christian church those who are more conservative might find her a little bit too unconservative.
Radix: Right, right.
JL: So she’s kind of in, you know, a funny place. And I think Crystal Downing’s done a good job of kind of helping show that actually she’s got a lot to say that you could, you know, see it from both perspectives as being valuable to different perspectives or different points of view. So that’s kind of my take on things. And I think that what I’m excited to see is that there are more younger scholars who are looking at her work. A recent book that was published was called Square Haunting by a woman named Francesca Wade. And it was a mainstream book, and it covered several authors, including Dorothy Sayers, who all lived in the same neighborhood post-World War I and became writers. So just from a historical point of view, I think Sayers is becoming of greater interest. Like, “Who was this person? And what did she have to say? And why was she so popular?” So that’s. Yeah, anyways, that’s kind of a lot. Sorry.
Radix: No, no, that’s okay. No, I appreciate it. I will include that and I’ll get the links in there as well. It’s good to know. And especially because you know the area and so many people don’t. I totally appreciate you providing all those resources.
JL: Yeah, no problem. It’s been really fun to talk to you, Matthew.
Radix: Oh, this is this has been lovely. Lovely. Thank you very much.
[1] Neil R. Storey & Molly Housego, Women in the First World War (Oxford: Shore Publications, 2018), 58.
[2] Dorothy Sayers, “Gaudy Night.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Howard Haycraft (New York, New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992), 208.
[3] Barbara Reynolds, and Ralph Hone, The Passionate Intellect: Dorothy Sayers’ Encounter with Dante (Kent Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989), 207.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Dorothy Sayers, Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World (Grand Rapids Michigan: Eerdmans, 1969), 142.
[7] Ibid, 143.
[8] Crystal Downing, Subversive: Christ, Culture, and the Shocking Dorothy L. Sayers (Minneapolis, Minnesota: BroadLeaf Books, 2016), 160-161.