Dorothy L. Sayers

Life

Sayers was born on June 13, 1893, in Oxford, England, the only child of the Anglican clergyman Henry Sayers. At the time of her birth, her father was headmaster of Christ Church Cathedral School in Oxford. She grew up in the rectory at Bluntisham, Cambridgeshire, and began learning Latin from her father before she was seven. She entered Somerville College, University of Oxford, on a scholarship and in 1915 completed her studies in modern languages with first-class honors. She is counted among the first women to receive degrees from Oxford. After graduating, she worked for the publisher Blackwell, and from 1922 to 1929 she was a copywriter at a London advertising agency while also writing fiction. In 1926 she married the journalist Oswald Arthur Fleming. She died on December 17, 1957, in Witham, Essex.

Work and Achievements

• Detective fiction: After publishing her first novel in 1923, she spent nearly fifteen years writing a series featuring the aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey. The series made her one of the leading writers of the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction.
• Christian writing: Although a layperson rather than a member of the clergy, she wrote and lectured on Christian doctrine. She also served as a churchwarden in a London parish. Her theology is regarded as traditional, doctrinally oriented Anglican theology. In The Mind of the Maker, she explained the process of human creative work by analogy with the Trinity. She held that creation consists of the idea, the energy that works the idea out into a finished work, and the power the work exerts on those who receive it.
• The Man Born to Be King: A twelve-part serial drama broadcast on BBC radio from December 1941 to October 1942, it covers events from the visit of the Magi to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Sayers translated the words of Jesus directly from the Greek text and had her characters speak in the everyday idiom of her own time.
• Translation of Dante: She translated the Inferno (1949) and the Purgatorio (1955) of Dante's Divine Comedy into English but did not finish her translation of the Paradiso. She is said to have regarded this translation as her most important work.
• Friendships: She was acquainted with T. S. Eliot, Charles Williams, and C. S. Lewis, and she admired G. K. Chesterton.

Influence on the Korean Church

In Korea, Sayers first became known through translations of her detective fiction, such as the Lord Peter Wimsey series. Korean bookstores and publishers present her as a novelist, translator, theologian, and Christian thinker. In Christian circles she is sometimes grouped with C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and others as one of the "Oxford Christians." However, no sources have been identified that address any specific influence she had on the theology or ministry of the Korean church.

Assessment

The Man Born to Be King provoked considerable controversy when it was broadcast. The Lord's Day Observance Society, an organization that promoted Sunday observance, published its objections in The Times on December 30, 1941. Some believers also argued that having a human actor voice Christ was blasphemous. They likewise objected to the use of modern colloquial speech in place of the style of the Authorized Version. The BBC continued the broadcasts without altering the scripts. Many listeners expressed gratitude that the vivid portrayal of the Gospel characters had made Jesus feel close to them. C. S. Lewis is also said to have reread the work every year. Some scholars interpret the work in connection with British wartime propaganda during the Second World War. After Sayers's death, a trend emerged, particularly in the United States, of reassessing her as a Christian humanist.