How we came to read the biography is a usual case of “stumbling through books.” Last year Harriet and I read Sayers’s translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy aloud to each other.² This then led me to read Barbara Reynolds’ excellent The Passionate Intellect: Dorothy L. Sayers’ Encounter with Dante, which of course made me want to read Reynolds’ biography.

A few reactions:

• I particularly liked learning more about Sayers as a dramatist, which is the part of her work I’m least familiar with.
• One striking thing to me is just how unemotional she was (you pick this up somewhat in her nonfiction and even in her fiction, but not quite to this degree). She never seems particularly attached to her child John Anthony (whom she had out of wedlock and was therefore raised by her cousin Ivy) and her husband, with whom she had a bad relationship after the first few years, basically figures as a minor annoyance whose death takes up a paragraph or two in the biography with apparently little impact on Sayers.
• One odd thing is that Reynolds herself was a close friend of Sayers, who was her godmother, but she barely mentions herself. The friendship does give her a lot of good insights into Sayers’ thoughts, though.
• Apparently all this time I’ve been pronouncing her name in the way she hated SAY-ERS rather than SAIRS. Oops.
• An important part of Sayers’ early life in the early 1920s was influenced by her opposition to artificial contraception. Reynolds says she doesn’t understand this since Sayers was an Anglo-Catholic, not a Roman Catholic. But of course at the time opposition to contraception was hardly the position of the Catholic Church alone, as it nearly is now.