Thursday 3 May 2012

SAW; Dorothy L Sayers

Somerville Arts Week 2012 began on Monday 30th April with a talk from two delightful ladies from the Dorothy L Sayers Society, an international ‘appreciation society’ dedicated to the life and work of detective novelist and notable Somerville alumnus, Dorothy L Sayers. 2012 is the centenary of Sayers ‘coming up’ to Oxford and the society is commemorating this in August with a convention that is taking place in college and will comprise of various talks and events, celebrating the life and memory of the writer and reviving enthusiasm for her work. Radio 4, who serialised some of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries on air, recently did this too. Sayers’ talent and determination to succeed in all areas of her work is admirable, and in true Somerville fashion, her particular fortitude to pursue lines that were previously the realm of men designates her as a figure that Somerville should be proud to remember and promote. It was therefore an absolute pleasure to invite Seona Ford and Jasmine Simeone, the Vice-Chairman and Secretary of the society respectively, to speak during term-time to the students and enlighten them on some of the lesser known aspects of Sayers’ life and work, particularly her poetry, something that the audience, myself included were ignorant of its importance and influence on her. The talk was part biography, interspersed with passages from her books and anecdotes from her life.

Sayers was born in Oxford, her ‘appreciation of words’ was evident from an early age when she would change the language of nursery rhymes to fit her own family and experiences. Like many authors, she was a great reader and constantly experimented with poetry and prose relating to the world around her, acting as a script writer for a pageant at a local village and producing poems such as ‘The Gargoyle’ in her mid teens. Sayers won the Gilchrist scholarship to Oxford to study modern languages with the highest recorded marks that year, where she continued to flourish and cultivate her talent through groups of like-minded students such as ‘the mutual admiration society,’ a group of young women who encouraged each other with their work and studies.

Sayers’ work was influenced by the goings on around her and much of her work is drawn directly from her experiences in Oxford during the First World War and consequently her work at Bensons, an advertising agency, where she first began to develop a taste for the manipulation of words and style. This assisted her greatly in ‘Murder Must Advertise,’ her experiences of a working environment dominated by men were seen here and subsequently in the work of Miss Climpson, a character with a typing bureau in the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries who is employed by Wimsey to assist his investigations, as in the musings of Lord Peter and thus Sayers herself, who would suspect a woman…?

Sayers had a confident and direct yet professional approach to writing. She was aware of censorship laws, seen notably in ‘Whose Body?’ where her idea for the body found to be a naked man in bath drew much intrigue and controversy. Sayers was also prepared to research her material intricately. ‘Five Red Herrings’ required research into train timetables and the work of painters and ‘The Nine Tailors’ facilitated a great deal of research into the art of bell-ringing, yet by the end of this Sayers had still never pulled a rope.

The best thing about the talk was the insight it gave into how varied the work of Sayers was. She wrote comedy, mystery, about religion, village life, the impact of the war, her cats and even did a great deal of work translating other works such as ‘Song of Rowland’ and Dante, the latter being completed after her death by her goddaughter, Margaret Reynolds who was chair of the Dorothy L Sayers society until her death in March. Sayers was also an incredibly sophisticated writer. She moved both the genre and characters of detective fiction forward; Martin Edwards has recognised this particularly with the development of Lord Peter Wimsey, who was given a history of shell shock from the war and was impacted by the various reforms of the roles of peers in the House of Lords during the time of Sayers’ writing.

Somerville college has produced a vast number of strong female authors, Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain included, but the dedication of Sayers to her writings, her characters and to Oxford itself, seen most particularly with the reunion of Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey in the fictional Shrewsbury College in ‘Gaudy Night,’ ensures that she will and should be celebrated as a great author as well as a great Somervillian. 

‘The Gargoyle.’



The Gargoyle takes his giddy perch

On a cathedral or a church,

There, mid ecclesiastic style
He smiles an early Gothic smile
And while the parson, full of pride,
Spouts at his weary flock inside,
The Gargoyle, from his lofty seat,
Spouts at the people in the street;
And like the parson seems to say,
In accents doleful, ‘Let Us Pray.’
I like the gargoyle best. He plays
So cheerfully on rainy days-
While parsons, no one can deny,
Are awful dampers when they’re dry.

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