User:Deemodango/Dorothy L. Sayers

The Mutual Admiration Society
Sayers was part of The Mutual Admiration Society (MAS), a literary society of undergraduate women during her studies in Somerville College, Oxford, one of Oxford's first two women colleges. The MAS was formed by Sayers in 1912 along with two other Somerville students, Amphilis Middlemore and Charis Ursula Barnett as a women's writing community to read and critique each other's works. Sayers named the group "Mutual Admiration Society", remarking, "if we didn't give ourselves that title, the rest of College would." Prescott comments that, "The name was meant to be humorous, meant to soften its closed status, making its existence tolerable, even attractive, among students....the MAS, by its very name, threw the ball back to hose who looked upon women students at Oxford with hidden disdain or trepidation, aiming, with subtlety, that name toward male dominated Oxford."

Together, the MAS made one unique volume of written work titled, The Blue Moon. This contained six pieces, three of which were poems written by Sayers. Sayer's short story "Who Calls the Tune?" was also included.

Such a community allowed its female members within the largely male oriented environment of Oxford to have a literary haven where they could provide each other with literary, social, professional, and personal support. Their influences on one another extended throughout their academic and personal lives and they continued to remain in contact for decades after their Oxford days through letters and visits to one another.

Including Sayers, there are a total of 9 documented members: Dorothy L. Sayers, Amphilis Middlemore, Charis Ursula Barnett, Muriel Jaeger, Margaret Amy Chubb, Marjorie Maud Barber, Muriel St. Clare Byrne, Dorothy Hanbury Rowe, and Catherine Hope Godfrey. Prescott observes that this small society of undergraduate students in Oxford would come to produce "vibrant women, prolific authors, theatrical figures, social activists, teachers, and scholars in their own right" and that, "the women of the MAS shaped their lives, individually and collectively, as a testament to strength of purpose, not only with respect to their gender, but as fully invested members of humanity."

Religion
* reference essays

Women's rights
Sayers refused to be identified as a feminist stating, "I am afraid—that I was not sure I wanted to “identify myself,” as the phrase goes, with feminism, and that the time for “feminism,” in the old-fashioned sense of the word, had gone past." However, that did not prevent her from grappling with inequalities brought about from gender discrimination and responding to issues on women's rights. In her essay, Are Women Human, an address she gave to a Women's Society in 1938, she writes in clarifying what feminism should be, considering how assertions such as, “a woman is as good as a man” or the tendency to "copy what men do," may in fact subvert the point an advocate of women's rights would want to prove in the first place. In the essay she concludes with this: "'Indeed, it is my experience that both men and women are fundamentally human, and that there is very little mystery about either sex, except the exasperating mysteriousness of human beings in general...If you wish to preserve a free democracy, you must base it—not on classes and categories, for this will land you in the totalitarian State, where no one may act or think except as the member of a category. You must base it upon the individual Tom, Dick and Harry, on the individual Jack and Jill—in fact, upon you and me.'"Rather than discriminating between the differences of genders she believed that it is the recognition of our shared humanity as individual human beings upon which equality should be built.

Sayers continues to elaborate on the same argument in her other essay The Human-Not-Quite-Human in which she satirises existing gender stereotypes by flipping them around.

C. S. Lewis
Sayer's friendship with C. S. Lewis first began as a fan letter she had written in admiration of his Christian apologetic novel, The Screwtape Letters. Lewis later recounted, "[Sayers] was the first person of importance whoever wrote me a fan letter." He expressed his mutual admiration in a responding letter, calling her The Man Born to be King a complete success and continued to read the play cycle every Holy Week thereafter. Their ongoing correspondence discussed their writing and academic interests, providing one another with criticisms, suggestions, and encouragement. Carol and Philip Zaleski note, “Sayers had much in common with Lewis and Tolkien’s circle, including a love of orthodox Christianity, traditional verse, popular fiction, and debate.”

Though the two became friends under the circumstance of shared academic and theological interests, they had their disagreements regarding the movement towards the ordination of women in the Church of England. Lewis, in opposition to the movement, had written to Sayers in request that she would also speak up against it. However Sayers, unable to see any theological reason against such an ordination, declined, writing back in a letter, "I fear you would find me rather an uneasy ally."

Sayers comments on Lewis' views of women in another letter, stating, "I do admit that he is apt to write shocking nonsense about women and marriage. (That, however, is not because he is a bad theologian but because he is a rather frightened bachelor.)”

G.K. Chesterton
Sayers was greatly influenced by G.K. Chesterton, fellow detective fiction novelist, essayist, critic, among other things, commenting that, "I think, in some ways, G.K.’s books have become more a part of my mental make-up than those of any writer you could name.” She was familiar with Chesterton through his writings during her adolescent years and had attended his lectures in Oxford during her studies in Somerville. The two only became acquainted with one another as friends in 1917 when Sayers, as a published author, approached Chesterton as mutual professionals.

In the preface to Chesterton's play, The Surprise, Sayers writes, "To the young people of my generation, G.K.C. was a kind of Christian liberator. Like a beneficent bomb, he blew out of the Church a quantity of stained glass of a very poor period, and let in the gusts of fresh air in which the dead leaves of doctrine danced with all the energy and indecorum of Our Lady’s Tumbler."They were both part of the Detection Club, a group for British mystery writers, with Chesterton being elected as its first president (1930 – 1936) and Sayers its third (1949 –1957).

Detective fiction
* talk about her being part of detective circles, relationships with other detective writers

* talk about that letter where she was like 'mum im only a detective writer because it's good money'

* add image to detective fiction section on the main page

(considering to strike this section because the main article already has a lot dedicated to this topic)

Other Christian and academic work
* talk about her views on sex and gender

* consider making a separate page for her essay 'are women human'

(this section already exists in the main article and may overlap with my section on feminism and religion. maybe consider merging them to here or changing it up somehow..?)