the courage to ask for time off, the hierarchy at Benson’s accepted what she said at face value. So did her parents. Resting in bed at Southbourne, Sayers scribbled away at Clouds of Witness, her second book about the aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, and mapped out the future in her mind. On New Year’s Day, she wrote to her much-loved cousin Ivy Shrimpton, asking if Ivy and her mother, both experienced and trustworthy foster careers, would look after another infant. She didn’t mention she was the mother. Two days later her son, John Anthony, was born.
When Ivy agreed to look after him, Sayers told her the truth. Her parents must not be told, she insisted. The news would mortify them. Giving birth to an illegitimate child was not, she told Ivy, the kind of ‘ill-doing’ which her mother would tolerate. The Sayers were proud of their clever, lively daughter, and she could not bear to let them down. Perhaps she underestimated their love for her, but Ivy proved utterly reliable. The Sayers went to their graves without ever learning that they had a grandchild. Bill White had no further contact with his son John Anthony. Within four years, he had met someone else, and divorced Beatrice. After that, he never saw his daughter Valerie again either.
To the end of Sayers’ life, the existence of her child was known only to Ivy and a handful of trusted confidants. Beatrice kept quiet too. Not until Sayers died did she tell Valerie that she had a half-brother. Valerie and John Anthony never met, because by the time she plucked up the nerve to contact him, he was dead.
Did anyone else guess the truth? At first, Sayers congratulated herself on managing her absence from Benson’s with the utmost discretion, although on returning to work, people noticed she had put on weight. One colleague at least, it seems, saw though the mysterious ‘illness’. Suspecting what had happened, he tried to make mischief, terrifying Sayers with the threat of exposure.
Courage was a quality Dorothy Sayers never lacked. Her tormentor had no hard evidence to support his guesswork, and she faced him down. Somehow she found the strength to say, ‘Publish and be damned’, and made sure he kept his mouth shut. Her secret was secure. Later, she would take her revenge on him, but not until it became safer to do so.
Before and after Benson’s, Oxford played a pivotal role in Sayers’ life. She was born in the city on 13 June 1893. Her father, an ordained priest, had been a contemporary of Oscar Wilde at Magdalen College, but his life followed a much less exotic course than Oscar’s. When his daughter was four, he was offered the living at Bluntisham, in East Anglia’s fen country. Oxford and Fenland provided the settings for two of Sayers’ most admired novels, Gaudy Night and The Nine Tailors. After the Godolphin School in Salisbury, she won a scholarship to Somerville College, where she studied modern languages and medieval literature.
The feminist and pacifist Vera Brittain, an Oxford contemporary, described Sayers as ‘a bouncing and exuberant young female’. That bounce and exuberance never deserted Sayers, despite the blows that rained down on her over the years. Tall, thin, and with a neck that earned her the nickname ‘Swanny’, she stood out from the crowd, and made up for her lack of natural beauty with a flamboyant taste in clothes. She liked to wear a three-inch-wide scarlet riband round her head, and earrings in the form of miniature cages containing brightly-coloured parrots. Often she strode down the High, smoking a cigar while a cloak billowed around her.
Her busy social life included attending a lecture by G. K. Chesterton, whom she admired as a man, as well as for his detective stories. She also developed crushes on Dr Hugh Allen, director of the Bach Choir, and Roy Ridley, a handsome Balliol student who later became the college’s chaplain. Ridley was the physical original of a fictional Balliol man, Lord Peter Wimsey.
In August 1914, oblivious of the tense political climate in Europe, she set off for a long holiday in France, which was duly interrupted by the outbreak of war: for all her intellectual gifts, she could be hopelessly naïve. The following year Douglas Cole (like Chesterton, a future Detection Club colleague), a co-editor of Oxford Poetry, accepted one of her poems for publication. Before long, she produced a slim volume of verse. Having achieved a First in French, she applied for a job in the French Red Cross, but was turned down because she was too young. After a spell as a teacher, she worked for Blackwell’s, the publishers, in Oxford, where she fell in love with Eric Whelpton, a handsome soldier who have been invalided out of the Army.
After the war ended, Whelpton started teaching in France. Sayers chased him across the Channel, and took a job as his assistant. When he teased her about her enthusiasm for crime fiction, she told him some friends from Oxford were planning to make a fortune by writing detective stories. The group included Douglas Cole, his wife Margaret, and Michael Sadleir, later a successful publisher. They thought they could create a market, and had it in mind to set up a writing syndicate together. Sayers urged Whelpton to join them, but he was not interested. Worse, he did not reciprocate her devotion.
Whelpton became involved with a married woman, and a chastened Sayers returned to London to lick her wounds. Her morale received a much-needed boost when – in the same post-war mood that saw women given the vote (provided they were thirty years old), the first female MP returned to office, and the first woman called to the Bar – Oxford University allowed women to graduate formally. Sayers was among the first group of female students from Oxford to be invested with both a B.A. and, because five years had passed since she had taken her finals, an M.A.
Equal rights for women remained, however, a distant dream. Working men worried about women taking their jobs, and trade union pressure pushed women towards the career cul-de-sac of domestic service. Even highly educated women found their horizons narrowing. Their choice was often between a career coupled with a life of celibacy, or redundancy and marriage.
With so many young men killed in combat, marriage was often not an option. The problem of the ‘surplus woman’ was widely debated by the chattering classes. One successful Golden Age suspense novel (written by a single woman) even saw a deranged serial killer decide to solve that problem by ridding the world of unmarried females. For Sayers, the answer lay in building an independent and fulfilling career, preferably as a writer. After being turned down for a series of jobs, she returned to teaching as a stopgap. Meanwhile, she tried her hand at a detective story.
She began with the mystery of ‘a fat lady found dead in her bath with nothing on but her pince-nez’. After the victim – a sympathetically presented Jew – underwent a sex change, this became the opening of Whose Body? In Sayers’ original version, Lord Peter Wimsey deduces that a body in a bath is not that of Sir Reuben Levy, a financier, because it is not circumcised. The publishers thought this too coarse for the delicate sensibilities of readers, and required her to change the physical evidence so as to suggest that the corpse belonged to a manual worker, rather than a rich man.
Originally, Wimsey featured as a minor character in an unpublished story. This was probably intended for the Sexton Blake series, produced by a writing syndicate. Sayers also toyed with the idea of introducing Wimsey in a play (‘a detective fantasia’ called The Mousehole) that she did not finish. When she embarked on a novel, she decided this son of a duke would be her detective.
Her intentions were satiric rather than snobbish. A detective who was not a professional police officer, she reasoned, needed to be rich and to have plenty of leisure time to devote to solving mysteries. She conceived Wimsey as a caricature of the gifted amateur sleuth, and found it amusing to soak herself in the lifestyle of someone for whom money was no object. When Wimsey first comes into the story, ‘his long amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.’
Sayers endowed Wimsey with criminology, bibliophily, music and cricket as favourite recreations. He is a Balliol man, equipped with a magnifying glass disguised as a monocle, a habit of literary quotation and an engaging, if often frivolous, demeanour. His valet and former batman, the imperturbable Mervyn Bunter, became devoted to him when they fought
