Spiritual Writings

by Dorothy L. Sayers, Ann Loades

Admirers of Sayers' detective fiction are not always aware of her talents as a writer of spirituality, translator of Dante, and forerunner of Christian feminism. Ann Loades interweaves Sayers' life experiences with her theology to produce a complete portrait of Sayers from her childhood to her later writings and discovery of Dante. Includes excerpts from both poetry and fiction, broadcast plays, popular religious essays, biography, satire, and her mature reflections on work, vocation, creativity, and imagination.

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

The detective stories of well-known British writer Dorothy Leigh Sayers mostly feature the amateur investigator Lord Peter Wimsey; she also translated the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri.

This renowned author and Christian humanist studied classical and modern languages.

Her best known mysteries, a series of short novels, set between World War I and World War II, feature an English aristocrat and amateur sleuth. She is also known for her plays and essays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy...

Reviews

[Lee Lacy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read through Dorothy Sayers' detective canon repeatedly through the last 30 years and always vaguely resented her decision to give up Lord Peter and concentrate on theological writings, until this book introduced me to them.

Have you ever had the experience of accidentally running into a friend when she's flying full speed at her profession, like popping in when she's teaching a class to a large lecture hall? This book is like that - it's seeing an old friend in a completely new, and probably more accurate, light.

I got my copy at an estate sale, where I realized as I was going through the books that I had worked with the person, many years before, a genuinely lovely man. Now the book has even more layers of meaning for me.

[Gille Liath · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's probably true that, as CS Lewis said, compiling an anthology is a thankless task. Still, some editors do more to deserve thanks than others. The fact that the present editor's name, Ann Loades, appears in bigger letters on the cover than does the title is enough to set off alarm bells; and in the event she does too much to obtrude her own opinions and too little to present those of Sayers. Few writers would be well served by extracts which are an average length of half a page, and she is certainly not one of them. I really have no idea why Loades did not think it better to present substantial extracts of, at least, several pages each from works the majority of which are otherwise out of print or prohibitively expensive.

As a result it is hard to tell whether Sayers had anything worthwhile to say in prose about spiritual questions. Her ideas are subtle and unorthodox, I think you would have to read pretty extensively from her work to understand them fully (and who knows whether the effort would be worth it?). As for her poetry - well, it is not an accident that the only works of hers that are really still read are her detective stories. The great seriousness with which she seemed to take poetry-writing is an object lesson in the fact that the subjective sense of inspiration is not a reliable guide to the quality of one's work. It is puzzling though that Loades quotes almost nothing from her translation of, or commentary on, Dante's Divine Comedy, which is work of real substance that Sayers herself considered her best.

One area where her views are pretty clear, though, is on economics. In an excerpt from her polemical book about 'Christian society' written during the war, the arguments she develops about meaningful work make a lot of sense; but, shamefully, she ends up arguing that people should have to work for their dole - something that would completely undermine the dignity of labour she claims to support. Putting people to work is one thing - but if they're doing a proper job, you must pay them a proper wage.

It's a test of simple empathy with your fellows, and whether it can get the better of your class prejudices, which was also failed by fellow-travellers like CS Lewis and Tolkien. Despite their undeniable abilities, none of them seems to have understood that in the modern era you cannot have a society calling itself Christian which accepts the existence of poverty with a shrug, as a regrettable but inevitable tragedy which happens (fortunately) only to other people. If ending poverty also meant ending the highbrow culture which depends on privilege to survive (and perhaps, in practice, it does), their loyalties would unhesitatingly be with the latter.