Writing for the Masses: Dorothy L. Sayers and the Victorian Literary Tradition

255 Pages·2017·3.78 MB·English

by  Christine Colon

Writing for the Masses
In Writing for the Masses: Dorothy L. Sayers and the Victorian Lit-
erary Tradition Dr. Christine A. Colón explores how Sayers carefully
negotiates the complexities of early twentieth-century literary culture by
embracing a specifically Victorian literary tradition of writing to engage
a wide audience. Using a variety of examples from Sayers’s detective fic-
tion, essays, and religious drama, Dr. Colón charts Sayers’s development
as a writer whose intense desire to connect with her audience eventually
compels her to embrace the role of a Victorian sage for her own age.
Ultimately, the Victorian literary tradition not only provides her with
an empowering model for her own work as she struggles as a writer of
detective fiction to balance her integrity as an artist with her desire to
reach a mass audience, but also facilitates her growth as a public intel-
lectual as she strives to help her nation recover from the devastation of
World War II.
Christine A. Colón is Associate Professor of English at Wheaton Col-
lege, Illinois. She received her doctorate in English from the University of
California at Davis and has published a number of articles on Romantic
and Victorian authors, a monograph entitled Joanna Baillie and the Art
of Moral Influence (Peter Lang 2009), and a popular work entitled Sin-
gled Out: Why Celibacy Must Be Reinvented in Today’s Church (Brazos
2009), which won an award of merit from Christianity Today in 2010.
Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.
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46 Writing for the Masses
Dorothy L. Sayers and the Victorian Literary Tradition
Christine A. Colón
Writing for the Masses
Dorothy L. Sayers and the Victorian
Literary Tradition
Christine A. Colón
First published 2018
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Dorothy L. Sayers as a
Middlebrow Writer 1
Part I
Crafting a Literary tradition through
Charitable reading 11
1 Reading the Past: Sayers vs. the Leavises 13
2 Defending Tennyson: Sayers’s Art of Charitable Reading 41
Part II
Balancing Craft and Expectation in
Detective Fiction 69
3 Establishing the Genre: Popular
or Literary? 71
4 Resisting Closure: The Nine Tailors, The
Moonstone, and Bleak House 99
5 Refining Characterization: The Nine Tailors
and The Woman in White 129
vi Contents
PART III
Transforming Modern Society as a “Victorian Sage” 159
6 Navigating the Sage Tradition: Begin Here
and the Challenges of World War II 161
7 Grappling with Christian Truth: The Man
Born to Be King and Questions of Belief 186
Conclusion 218
Bibliography 231
Index 243
Acknowledgments
Writing for the Masses would never have been possible without the sup-
port of Wheaton College, which provided me with the sabbatical time to
do much of the research for this book. I am also thankful for the amaz-
ing staff at the Marion E. Wade Center of Wheaton College, who pulled
countless folders for me as I worked my way through the Sayers Papers.
Laura Schmidt and Elaine Hooker were wonderful resources whether I
was tracking down a source or trying to decipher Sayers’s handwriting.
Additionally, I appreciate David Higham Associates for granting me per-
mission to quote extracts from the unpublished letters and manuscripts
of Dorothy L. Sayers.
I am also grateful for the encouragement and help I received along
the way from Marjorie Lamp Mead, Timothy Larsen, Crystal Downing
and Mary Anne Phemister as well as from my colleagues in the English
Department and the students in my courses on Sayers who let me try out
many of my ideas on them. Finally, I wish to thank my husband, Bob
Locascio, for his constant support and love.

Introduction
Dorothy L. Sayers as a
Middlebrow Writer
Who is Dorothy L. Sayers? A writer of detective fiction? A playwright?
A lay-theologian? A feminist thinker? An inspiration for the classical
education movement? A Dante translator? While many readers recog-
nize Sayers in only one of those guises, those who know the scope of her
work have often wrestled with the different aspects of her varied career,
searching for the characteristics or themes that hold them together.
Barbara Reynolds, for instance, declares that
the young Dorothy Sayers who brought her debonair, aristocratic
sleuth into being in the pages of Whose Body? in 1923 is the same
in essentials as the mature scholar-poet-interpreter who made Dante
intelligible and relevant to millions of modern readers.1
But which essentials do we focus on? For Catherine Kenney, scholar-
ship is the key to Sayers’s career, which she believes is revealed “in the
integrity she brought to writing fiction and criticism, in her capacity for
change and growth, and in her energetic employment of well-honed skills
in the study and translation of medieval French and Italian works.”2 For
Margaret Hannay, “[t]he sacramental value of work is the theme which
unifies Dorothy L. Sayers’s writings in many genres.”3 And for Crystal
Downing, Sayers, with the variety of her works, “anticipated postmod-
ern paradigms” by using her writing to enact various “performance[s]
of cultural values, of the dogmas to which one has given assent, of the
language in and through which meaning is inscribed.”4
While each of these perspectives provides important insights into
Sayers’s work, I am particularly interested in the intersection between
Sayers’s commitment to the integrity of her craft and her commitment
to reaching a wide audience: choices that I believe stem, at least in part,
from her love and respect for Victorian writers. With her choices, Sayers
established herself as a middlebrow author, which by placing her work
at odds with much of the developing tradition of literary modernism has
resulted in her being excluded from most scholarly discussions of early,
twentieth-century English literature. As scholars have started to dis-
cover, however, the literary landscape of the early twentieth century was
much more complex than has often been acknowledged, and bringing