Dorothy L. Sayers - Gollancz files (two boxes).
DOROTHY L. SAYERS
GOLLANCZ PUBLISHING FILES, 1928-1964
Correspondence, contracts, and more, revealing Sayer’s working relationship with her publishers and
publication terms for her works, and discussing aspects of her work with which she wrestled. Though
Sayers – one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford University – wrote in many genres, she is
best known for her crime fiction: a niche historically dominated by men. Various threads of her feminism
are woven throughout several of her novels, punctuated by her essay, “Are Women Human,” which
appears in a non-fiction collection.
These files, acquired directly from the publisher, have been untapped by scholars.
***
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) had not one career but several, distinguishing herself as a crime writer,
Christian theologian, literary critic, ad copywriter, essayist, poet, playwright, and translator. Her father,
Rev. Henry Sayers, who served as rector and headmaster in a tiny town in the county of Huntingdonshire,
began teaching her Latin, German, and French when she was six years old. After completing her secondary
education at a boarding school in Salisbury, she won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford. Women
could not earn degrees from Oxford in 1915, when she completed her studies in modern languages and
medieval literature, but when the program changed its rules in 1920, Sayers was among the first women to
receive one.
After Oxford, Sayers wrote poetry (publishing two collections, in 1916 and 1918) and taught for a year in
France before accepting a copywriter position at S.H. Benson’s advertising agency in London. Sayers
excelled in the industry, collaborating on major campaigns for companies including Colman’s Mustard and
Guinness beer. The slogan “It pays to advertise” was reportedly coined by Sayers. She worked at Benson’s
for nine years and it was during this period of stable employment that she began dabbling in detective
fiction. Her first novel, Whose Body, was published in 1923, and for the next decade, she continued to
write at a pace of about one book per year, plus the occasional collection of short stories. The protagonist
of Sayers’s tales was Lord Peter Wimsey, a highly educated and high strung character who occasionally
suffered from bouts of anxiety due to his service in World War I. Sayers introduced a love interest and
intellectual match for Wimsey in 1930’s Strong Poison: Oxford-educated mystery novelist Harriet Vane,
an obvious stand-in for Sayers herself. After a lengthy courtship stretched over the span of seven more
crime novels, the pair finally marry in the last full-length installment of the Wimsey series, Busman’s
Honeymoon (1937).
While often humorous, Sayers’s crime fiction was not without substance – the genre provided a platform
for her to explore a variety of topics, from the ethics of advertising (Murder Must Advertise) and the
scarred psyches of veterans (The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club) to a subject of tantamount
importance to Sayers personally: women’s education (Gaudy Night). The mystery at the center of Gaudy
Night involves an outbreak of vandalism and threats at Shrewsbury, a fictional women’s college most
likely based on Sayer’s alma mater, Somerville. The villain is ultimately revealed to be an angry widow
who resents intellectual women who try to move past the traditional domestic sphere. Cultural critic
Jacques Barzun described the book as “a remarkable achievement…magnificently orated.”
Sayers’s interests in feminism, education and the Church pervade her fiction as well as her nonfiction –
after retiring Lord Wimsey, she wrote a number of scholarly books and essays including the The Mind of a
Maker (1941), the still influential The Lost Tools of Learning (1947) in which she advocates for a return to
a Classical approach to education, and Unpopular Opinions (1947), which contains her famous essay “Are
Women Human?” based on an address she delivered in
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