Welcome! In case you’re new here or simply forgot, click here to be reminded that, among my neurodivergent special interests, Dorothy Sayers reigns supreme. She doesn’t make sense. None of us does, but my autistic brain rails against the notion. Here I am, working my way to the crux of my questions about her….
She brings to her stand of incense and candles:
Her Somerville College degree, conferred five years after finishing her university work. The first class of women to receive degrees from Oxford! That was her! All the lady dons in the book she’ll write fifteen years later cheer her on.
One of the Wimsey books, for sure. Even though Gaudy Night broke through to what she’d been wanting to do as a writer (see the steamy punting scene for the thing Sayers couldn’t give herself permission to do–until she could), that’s not the one. She can’t decide between The Nine Tailors (the kind and bumbling Anglican priest reminds her of her beloved minister dad) or Busman’s Honeymoon (Didn’t she have the most fun writing that play! Didn’t she call the actor Robert Montgomery perfect: “He is Peter Wimsey,” she crowed. And we all know she was in love with her lordly creation).
Possibly that Guinness advertisement she wrote. Yes: she’s so proud of it. No: it was only a project in passing; she had no idea that copies of it would still be hanging in pubs like the one in downtown Blacksburg, Virginia, where I ate my entire enormous dinner and finished off everyone else’s the evening before I went into labor with my first child. The poster with the toucan and the glass of beer on his beak: a balancing act. “Guinness is good for you!” Even when she coined the phrase, she wasn’t sure if advertising was for the good or from the devil.
Letters from that first lover, the one she loved most. The one she refused to sleep with because they weren’t married. (God, he was angry when he learned she’d had sex with the next man who came around, the one who was married…to someone else. The one she didn’t love. The one who got her pregnant.)
Almost nothing of her son’s. Scratch that. Probably his acceptance into a good secondary school or his graduation diploma. Not the 1923 birth certificate. None of the letters from the cousin who raised him. No letters from her parents about him, because they never knew. None of the letters from him, later on, addressed to “Aunt Dorothy.” Certainly not the 1935 adoption certificate, because it didn’t exist, even though the boy took on his stepfather’s last name. He didn’t learn he was never actually a Fleming till years later, applying for a passport.
Clothes: the swashbuckling costumes and scarves she wore around Oxford before she had a baby? Or the frumpy dresses, hats, and coats that hid her figure afterward?
Definitely Dante’s entire dang Comedy that she was translating with religious fervor until the day of her death, but I’m not there yet. I’m stuck at . . .
The birth of her son.
What about you? What historical figures inspire and intrigue you, despite—or because of—the seeming contradictions in their lives? Who captures your attention because they go against the grain of expectation?
Enjoyed your love letter to Dorothy L. Sayers. I am equally obsessed with Gail Godwin.