The Seven Deadly Sins in the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers

by Janice Brown

The impact of Dorothy L. Sayer’s work is a powerful one. She was a gifted artist who worked in many genres and addressed many issues, but her achievement goes beyond creative skill and variety of range. What she consistently communicates about Sin―the basic problem of human existence―provides a core of content which evokes, as she believed artistic work should, a spiritual “response in the lively soul” (The Zeal of Thy House).Janice Brown examines Sayer’s major works, beginning with her early poetry and moving through her works of fiction to the dramas, essays, and lectures written in the last years of her life. She illustrates how Sayers used popular genres to teach about sin and redemption, how she redefined the Seven Deadly Sins for the twentieth century, why she stopped writing mysteries, and her application of the concepts of sin and redemption to society as a whole.

Genres: Nonfiction

360 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 1998

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thorough. You could use this as a catalogue of the whole Dorothy Sayers canon. I regret having read this before her novels; in fact, I came away from this feeling distinctly underread and too intimidated to do anything about it. Gaudy Night interested me, but where the rest of Sayer’s authorship is concerned I’m not quite up to swallowing the whole, as it were, in a manner of speaking (ahem).

I would almost say that the focus of the book, the Seven Deadly Sins, could be something that is being read into Sayers’ work, except that I’m really not that acquainted with Sayers’ broader work (just Mind of the Maker, certain Letters to a Diminished Church, and the LPW short stories).

Incidentally, does it confuse anyone else that the SDS model essentially regards attitudes as sins? I get that covetousness gets to be one (avarice) by virtue of the tenth commandment, and lust and hate by Jesus’ extension of adultery and murder. I just wonder when one is sinning by attitude. I’ve heard a Reformed Presbyterian say that humans are always sinning, “missing the mark” (hamartia, if I remember my Greek), so that he could be sinning at this moment simply by breathing wrong. That’s one extreme, I suppose. If I tend to think pridefully, am I sinning constantly, just by virtue (or vice) of pride’s residence in my mind, or only in the physical action of my sticking up my nose at another person—that is, when the attitude reveals itself as motive in action? And when does a temptation to pride become a thought of pride become Pride itself? How is one to know without a standard of comparison with other minds? Is comparison even important? Idk guys. I’m really not well versed in peccatology. Somehow I can’t quite believe that breathing wrong is a sin, or that humans are hopelessly bound to keep on sinning throughout their lives.