Amy Orr-Ewing on Dorothy Sayers, Part 1

[00:00:03] Welcome to Women Worth Knowing, the radio program and podcast hosted by Cheryl Brodersen

[00:00:10] and Robin Jones Gunn.

[00:00:11] Hello there!

[00:00:13] You know there are so many Christian women with fascinating stories.

[00:00:17] In fact I am sure that your story is fascinating.

[00:00:21] But these women that we talk about some are missionary, some are musicians, some are

[00:00:25] reformers, authors, teachers, some are wives, some are single, some are mothers.

[00:00:31] But their stories are examples and inspirational to all of us.

[00:00:37] So this is Cheryl Brodersen, my co-host Robin is not here today.

[00:00:42] I am sad about that.

[00:00:44] She was so sad that she couldn't be here today.

[00:00:47] But I do have in studio a friend and someone I am so excited about because she and I

[00:00:55] are going to talk about, especially her, I'm going to just ask questions, about one of

[00:00:59] my favorite authors.

[00:01:02] So this is like a tufer, it's very, very exciting.

[00:01:05] So I have Dr. Amy Orwing and the interesting thing is Amy I knew you but I had no idea

[00:01:12] that you did your doctoral thesis on.

[00:01:16] Here it comes, drum roll.

[00:01:18] Dorothy Sears.

[00:01:19] Absolutely.

[00:01:20] Hi, Cheryl.

[00:01:21] Oh my goodness.

[00:01:23] I, of course I read all of the Peter Wimsey books.

[00:01:28] You know, as a child, high school.

[00:01:30] And then you, of course you read them again in your 20s and your 30s because they're

[00:01:35] fascinating mysteries.

[00:01:36] I love mysteries.

[00:01:37] I love that genre.

[00:01:38] And that was something that England kind of capitalized on.

[00:01:42] And then I began to discover her theological works like Letters to a Diminished Church,

[00:01:50] one of my all time favorites, Are Women Human?

[00:01:53] Yes.

[00:01:54] So, so good.

[00:01:55] Very good.

[00:01:56] And then, oh, her plays also.

[00:02:01] Yeah.

[00:02:02] The Mind of God.

[00:02:03] Yes.

[00:02:04] The Mind of the Maker.

[00:02:05] The Mind of the Maker.

[00:02:06] That's it.

[00:02:07] And then the play Cycle, The Man Born to Be King.

[00:02:09] That's it.

[00:02:10] Yes.

[00:02:11] So it was, I had no idea of this Christian heritage that Dorothy had till I was probably

[00:02:17] in my 50s.

[00:02:19] And I began to, I somehow picked up a biography, that strange woman at a thrift store in England.

[00:02:30] That's like, well, that later I learned that's not an authorized biography.

[00:02:35] So I'm going to start out.

[00:02:37] Why did you choose Dorothy Sears?

[00:02:39] Sure.

[00:02:40] So thanks so much for having me on the show for starters.

[00:02:44] It's my pleasure.

[00:02:45] It's like so exciting.

[00:02:46] Always a joy to be here.

[00:02:49] So I had worked in the field of Christian apologetics and public theology for quite a while, maybe

[00:02:56] 15 years.

[00:02:57] And hugely influential figure in that scene is C.S. Lewis, who we all love.

[00:03:03] You know, all Christians seemingly love Lewis.

[00:03:08] And one of Lewis's dearest friends and the only kind of woman who was regarded as being

[00:03:14] really in that circle was Dorothy El Sears, who obviously, as you've already said, was a

[00:03:21] writer of detective fiction.

[00:03:23] But during and after the Second World War really emerged as one of the leading Christian

[00:03:28] thinkers and speakers in the UK.

[00:03:32] And I became interested in how she presented Christ through the different genres that she

[00:03:43] used.

[00:03:44] She had a huge public and popular appeal.

[00:03:47] Actually after university, she was one of the first women, she was in the first cohort of

[00:03:51] women to be allowed to graduate from Oxford with a degree.

[00:03:54] So women used to be able to audit the courses, but she actually had a degree conferred on

[00:03:59] her.

[00:04:00] Wasn't that two years after she graduated?

[00:04:03] Yes, because, yeah, well, she'd already finished the course of study.

[00:04:07] And you know, she was in that first class.

[00:04:09] She was, you know, very high level.

[00:04:12] But she was in the first cohort that they actually awarded the Honours Degree to.

[00:04:18] And after that, she went to work in an advertising agency and she came up with the phrase,

[00:04:23] it pays to advertise.

[00:04:25] And all sorts of other creative ideas and advertising.

[00:04:30] We call those jingles here.

[00:04:32] I don't know if you call them jingles in England or not.

[00:04:34] It's a real kind of skill for that, for public communication.

[00:04:38] And yet this extraordinary depth as well.

[00:04:41] And so I realised that, as I kind of looked into her more, I realised that while Lewis

[00:04:48] after his death was increasingly read by Christians, sayers really wasn't.

[00:04:53] And while he had maybe 150 biographies of his life, she had less than 10.

[00:05:00] Whereas actually in their lifetime, she was seen as at least his equal in terms of impact.

[00:05:07] And that was interesting to me and I wanted to really dig into what kind of drove her work,

[00:05:14] what held her work together, what did the Lord really use in what she did uniquely

[00:05:20] that we could learn from today.

[00:05:22] So what places did your research take you?

[00:05:25] Ah, well physical places.

[00:05:28] One of them is the Wade Centre at Wheaton where they have the major collection of her

[00:05:34] writings and actually CS Lewis's writings are all held there.

[00:05:40] And so there's over 50,000 letters that she wrote.

[00:05:43] No.

[00:05:44] Yeah, the research meant reading everything she'd written,

[00:05:47] not just her published works but all.

[00:05:49] Oh my goodness.

[00:05:50] Yes.

[00:05:50] So her handwriting I got to know very well.

[00:05:54] And then I went to her hometown and there was a small sort of archive of material there.

[00:06:03] And then just a lot of study at Oxford as well, the libraries there were really amazing.

[00:06:07] So physically that's where it took me.

[00:06:10] And then like the scope of the research was beginning reading her.

[00:06:16] So Alice McGrath said to me, do the best way to approach this

[00:06:19] because it feels like an overwhelming task just to read it.

[00:06:22] Right.

[00:06:23] So the best thing to do is read everything she wrote in the order she wrote it.

[00:06:28] So as you read her 50,000 letters,

[00:06:31] read the letters that she's writing at the same time that she's writing

[00:06:35] that particular detective novel or that particular essay.

[00:06:40] So you're getting a sense of what's happening with the whole person.

[00:06:45] And that was just such a brilliant piece of advice.

[00:06:47] Excellent.

[00:06:47] Oh my goodness.

[00:06:48] I love that because also too you've got the context of when she's writing too

[00:06:54] because the letter sets the time.

[00:06:56] Yeah.

[00:06:56] And often she initially developed thoughts.

[00:06:58] So the thoughts that she developed in her book, The Mind of the Maker,

[00:07:03] which is a kind of book really about the Trinity, the doctrine of the Trinity.

[00:07:07] But she looks at it through the lens of human creativity

[00:07:11] in the process of writing a book as an author

[00:07:15] and shows how the Trinitarian God is actually reflected

[00:07:19] in our own human creative reality.

[00:07:24] But while she was coming up with those ideas,

[00:07:27] she'd actually written a play that explored some of that.

[00:07:30] And then she had extended correspondence of letters with a clergyman

[00:07:35] who asked her a lot of questions that enabled her to really develop these ideas.

[00:07:39] Clarified that.

[00:07:40] Exactly.

[00:07:41] All right.

[00:07:41] So now that we have this,

[00:07:44] let's talk about it because one thing that I was really excited about

[00:07:47] when I did read the first biography is, and I didn't know this,

[00:07:52] that her father and grandfather were both clergymen.

[00:07:57] Yes.

[00:07:58] Yeah.

[00:07:58] So she was born in the Vicarage to a clergyman and...

[00:08:04] She was born in 18...

[00:08:06] No.

[00:08:07] She was born in 1902, I think.

[00:08:13] I need to check that.

[00:08:14] Yes.

[00:08:15] OK.

[00:08:15] Sorry.

[00:08:15] Right.

[00:08:15] No, that's fine.

[00:08:16] Early 1900s.

[00:08:17] She went to university in 1917, I think.

[00:08:21] All right.

[00:08:21] Yeah.

[00:08:22] She was...

[00:08:23] Smile.

[00:08:23] Keep going.

[00:08:25] Please.

[00:08:25] You know.

[00:08:26] She...

[00:08:26] Yeah.

[00:08:27] So she was born in Oxford and very quickly they moved to the east of England

[00:08:33] and her dad had a parish on the east coast there.

[00:08:39] And she was a very kind of intelligent child.

[00:08:41] She was homeschooled and she very quickly began to develop a kind of gift for languages.

[00:08:50] So she got her first Greek New Testament at the age of 15 and started reading...

[00:08:57] OK, she started reading that.

[00:08:59] Sorry.

[00:09:00] Yeah.

[00:09:00] She was born in...

[00:09:01] 1893.

[00:09:02] Thank you.

[00:09:02] You were right.

[00:09:03] Sheryl.

[00:09:04] Sorry.

[00:09:05] I should have checked my dates.

[00:09:06] That's all right.

[00:09:07] No, it's so hard because for me the dates are not as important as like let's get to the story.

[00:09:12] Yeah, exactly.

[00:09:13] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:09:13] Right.

[00:09:14] So the life of the person.

[00:09:15] Yeah.

[00:09:16] So born...

[00:09:16] Yeah, that's right.

[00:09:17] Born at the end of the 19th century.

[00:09:21] And she developed this kind of love for languages and enjoyed the writings of G.K.

[00:09:29] Chesterton as a teenager.

[00:09:32] And had a wonderful kind of vibrant personal Christian faith as a teenager that comes through

[00:09:41] beautifully in the letters.

[00:09:42] Mm-hmm.

[00:09:43] Yeah.

[00:09:44] That's interesting because I didn't know that even at that stage that she was passionate

[00:09:54] or had a faith because the one book...

[00:09:59] I mean, it kind of made it sound that by the time she got to Cambridge...

[00:10:03] I mean, sorry, Oxford, she was a little disillusioned.

[00:10:07] So she had a bit of a crisis of faith at Oxford.

[00:10:10] Which happens to so many students in college.

[00:10:13] Yeah, but what was fascinating is that it wasn't really a crisis of unbelief in the

[00:10:22] sense that she still believed in God.

[00:10:24] She just had major questions really about the church and resolved those through

[00:10:34] correspondence with and conversation with her pastor, the vicar of the church she attended

[00:10:41] as a student.

[00:10:42] And by the end of her time at Oxford was probably more committed than she had been

[00:10:47] previously.

[00:10:48] That's so good.

[00:10:49] That's often the case, isn't it?

[00:10:50] When we go through a trial, the impetus can be to sort of suppress doubt or encourage

[00:10:58] young people not to question.

[00:10:59] But actually it's healthy to bring those questions out, explore them deeply.

[00:11:05] And she definitely did that.

[00:11:06] I read a book by George McDonald years and years ago.

[00:11:09] I loved everything George McDonald wrote.

[00:11:11] But he said...

[00:11:14] And I'm paraphrasing obviously, but he said there's nothing that strengthens faith

[00:11:19] like an honest doubt.

[00:11:22] Because an honest doubt will be searched out and it will end up strengthening your faith.

[00:11:27] And so for me, as growing up in my brand of Christianity, it was kind of like,

[00:11:33] don't question, don't question, don't question.

[00:11:35] And I found that actually questions strengthened my faith.

[00:11:39] They didn't dissolve it.

[00:11:41] Absolutely.

[00:11:42] Yeah.

[00:11:42] So I really liked that.

[00:11:43] And that would have been her similar experience for her too.

[00:11:48] I mean, the fact that she was already reading the New Testament in Greek before she got to

[00:11:53] university gives you a sense of her level of engagement.

[00:11:58] Well, I read that she could read and write by the time she was four.

[00:12:01] Yeah.

[00:12:02] And her father started teaching her Latin at seven years old.

[00:12:05] Yeah.

[00:12:05] And that she learned French and German in grade school.

[00:12:10] Yes.

[00:12:11] You know?

[00:12:11] And she studied Italian as well and medieval Italian later.

[00:12:14] Right.

[00:12:15] Because that will be very important in her story.

[00:12:19] Absolutely.

[00:12:20] So definitely a real gift for languages and I think a kind of intellectual curiosity

[00:12:28] that was broad.

[00:12:31] So she read widely and mixed with, after university, she mixed with what was called

[00:12:39] the Bloomsbury set who were, you know, in the 1920s, London, people like Virginia Woolf

[00:12:46] and others who were embracing atheism really.

[00:12:49] They're the kind of emerging bright young things and intellectuals of that London scene.

[00:12:57] So she was definitely a Christian but not a fundamentalist locked away, if that makes sense.

[00:13:04] It does.

[00:13:05] Especially if you have read any biographies, you begin to see that.

[00:13:11] And of course too, I think the Christian church expects Christian overtones or at least

[00:13:17] some kind of redemption story and the Peter Wimsey mysteries were more working with a

[00:13:24] genre of mystery perfecting almost that genre more than, well there is redemption

[00:13:32] in a few of them.

[00:13:34] I just remembered the red herrings.

[00:13:35] But did she correspond with G.K. Chesterton or she just admired him?

[00:13:43] She just admired him, yeah.

[00:13:45] Who was also an apologist.

[00:13:47] Yes and obviously a detective fiction writer.

[00:13:49] Exactly.

[00:13:50] Father Brown stories.

[00:13:51] Which of course I love those too.

[00:13:52] Yeah so detective fiction is really interesting for me.

[00:13:56] I saw in that really early glimpses of her apologetic methodology actually because what

[00:14:05] you have is a sort of story and narrative and a set of events that have occurred.

[00:14:12] And people after the fact are trying to discover what happened, what's really the truth of

[00:14:18] what occurred.

[00:14:20] And in order to discover that they have to sift through what you might call imposter

[00:14:25] narratives so stories that are not true, that are proposed explanations that actually

[00:14:32] aren't true.

[00:14:33] And you come to a conclusion about the truth on the basis of evidence and the detective

[00:14:38] the job of the detective is to sort of pursue truth.

[00:14:42] So if you apply that to the historical Jesus and the idea of the resurrection of

[00:14:46] the Son of God the sort of central historical reality of the Christian faith you can see

[00:14:52] that Sears was really interested in truth and evidence as a young person.

[00:14:58] And also this idea that the Christian faith at its heart is a story, it's a true story

[00:15:04] but it is actually a story and the incarnation is God coming as a person and living and dwelling

[00:15:10] among us not just a set of ideas that we need to learn and master in some way.

[00:15:16] Or moral structure.

[00:15:17] Yeah.

[00:15:18] Also, now she wrote, so she went from college and she started working again at the advertising

[00:15:26] agency and that's when, you know being a woman so brilliant.

[00:15:31] Now we're talking about what the 1920s?

[00:15:33] So we've got, you know World War I just, you know, ending and you're dealing with

[00:15:37] kind of the rebuilding.

[00:15:38] Yeah.

[00:15:39] Right.

[00:15:41] London and she's beginning to though I would think that being so brilliant she would be

[00:15:52] frustrated in a job of just simply advertising.

[00:15:57] Does that come across on her letters?

[00:15:59] So she, yes, she left university and she really wanted kind of intellectually fulfilling

[00:16:05] work.

[00:16:07] One of the big themes in her life as well is that some women at least do want to have,

[00:16:16] you know, pursue the intellectual life and not only operate in a domestic sphere and

[00:16:23] that that life should not be closed to them as a sort of theme.

[00:16:27] But at the same time, you know, her parents didn't have money so she needed to support

[00:16:32] herself and that's why she went into the advertising agency.

[00:16:36] But while she had a full-time job, she also wrote her novels and it was only when after

[00:16:42] murder must advertise became so successful that she was able to give up the job in the

[00:16:48] agency.

[00:16:49] Now, you know what I find interesting though is women really weren't at that time so

[00:16:54] much in the atmosphere of careers.

[00:17:00] I mean, women having careers really happened during World War II more with the deficit of

[00:17:06] men because they were going to war and so women began to fill those positions.

[00:17:11] So for her to work in an advertisement agency and be so successful was really a novelty,

[00:17:18] wasn't it?

[00:17:19] Yeah.

[00:17:20] So at that point a woman could probably be a poor woman who had some education might

[00:17:25] be able to be a governess.

[00:17:27] Obviously women were servants in domestic service or they were governesses or they may have

[00:17:34] had kind of secretarial work.

[00:17:37] So it really was quite unusual to work in the sort of job she worked in where she

[00:17:43] was actually coming up with slogans and you know, she wasn't just filing or typing.

[00:17:48] She was actually, you know...

[00:17:51] Yeah.

[00:17:52] I mean, about how Josephine Butler lived about the same time.

[00:17:55] I mean, she's older obviously.

[00:17:57] But you know, she opened those training schools for these young women because there

[00:18:02] weren't a lot of job opportunities open to women and you know, to get the young girls

[00:18:10] given them an alternative to prostitution to support.

[00:18:14] So I mean, Dorothy Sears with her, she was really opening the door to a lot of

[00:18:21] women to enter into college, into business.

[00:18:25] Trailblazer in a way.

[00:18:26] Yes, she was.

[00:18:27] Yes.

[00:18:28] I love that about her too.

[00:18:30] So I know this but I want to hear...

[00:18:34] Like Peter Wimsey, the detective in her novels.

[00:18:41] Tell us a little bit about him and who he was because when you know the author,

[00:18:46] you begin to recognise who these characters are, you know, a conglomeration of.

[00:18:52] Yeah.

[00:18:53] So Peter Wimsey is Lord Peter Wimsey.

[00:18:58] That's right, I forgot.

[00:18:59] So he's a sort of aristocratic gentleman which means he doesn't need to earn

[00:19:06] money, he doesn't have a job but he has a gift for detection and so the police

[00:19:15] often turn to him to help with unravelling crimes, murder crimes and then you have

[00:19:22] really the main character alongside him in Sears' fiction is called Harriet Vane

[00:19:29] and she's a sort of studious young woman who has again, you know...

[00:19:37] Very plain.

[00:19:38] Very rich.

[00:19:39] But very attractive in a plain way.

[00:19:42] Yes, exactly.

[00:19:44] Which is very close to Sears' self-perception and perception of others,

[00:19:51] of Sears I think.

[00:19:53] So yeah, Harriet Vane was a young woman who'd been to Oxford as well so there

[00:19:58] are lots of kind of parallels with her and there are different ideas about

[00:20:02] who Lord Peter Wimsey is based on but as you say a conglomerate

[00:20:07] of different ideals but he kind of talks with this very over-the-top

[00:20:13] aristocratic accent and has a huge kind of amazing car and has fallen madly

[00:20:19] in love with Harriet Vane and is pursuing her romantically.

[00:20:26] And we'll leave what happens between them to...

[00:20:28] You have to read the books.

[00:20:30] Exactly, it's thrown out.

[00:20:32] All five books!

[00:20:34] I've heard too that she was going to marry them off in like the second book

[00:20:39] but she realized she wouldn't make enough money if she tried to get...

[00:20:43] The book's going so yeah, there are quite a number of them.

[00:20:46] Yes, so you have to go all the way to...

[00:20:47] Is it Goddy Night to find out what happened?

[00:20:50] Yes, Gordy Night and then their actual marriage is called Bussman's Holiday.

[00:20:54] That's right.

[00:20:55] Yes.

[00:20:56] You know again it's been quite a while since reading the books.

[00:21:01] And they're really the type of book that you take on an airplane.

[00:21:04] Exactly.

[00:21:05] I mean they were massive commercial success.

[00:21:08] Dorothy Elcer and Agatha Christie were the main female writers of the Golden Age

[00:21:13] of detective fiction and obviously they're still in print

[00:21:17] and films have been made and all of that.

[00:21:20] So the detective fiction was a creative outlet for her.

[00:21:25] She was interested in the kind of technical art of detective fiction as well.

[00:21:30] She chaired sort of London Society of Detective Fiction Writers

[00:21:35] and she wrote academic articles as well about what detective fiction is

[00:21:40] and what its contribution to literature is.

[00:21:45] And then from a kind of Christian point of view,

[00:21:47] obviously there's this theme, this strand of how do you come to discover the truth?

[00:21:53] How do you sift through imposter untrue narratives about what happened?

[00:21:58] What does it mean to follow evidence?

[00:22:00] What does it mean to be a person for whom truth matters above all?

[00:22:06] I mean that's really what Gordy Knight, the novel is about.

[00:22:09] I love this.

[00:22:10] It reminds me a little bit of Jane Warner Wallace who we're both familiar with

[00:22:13] as an apologist who did Cold Case Christianity.

[00:22:16] And it's the same idea.

[00:22:18] I was struck by that as you were speaking like,

[00:22:21] I never saw this Cold Case Christianity going back and I love that.

[00:22:26] So how long did you work at the advertising?

[00:22:29] Oh, not for very long.

[00:22:30] So basically the main thing that happened at the advertising agency was that

[00:22:37] I think she worked there for about three years.

[00:22:41] But while she was there she had a relationship with a writer called John Cornass

[00:22:48] who was part of the Bloomsbury set and not a Christian,

[00:22:53] not a church go even.

[00:22:56] And she fell madly in love with him.

[00:22:58] It was a great kind of meeting of minds.

[00:23:01] And he wanted to say it's like the swinging 20s and he wanted to have

[00:23:06] a sexual relationship with her.

[00:23:09] And he said that he would never marry.

[00:23:13] On a sort of point of principle because he kind of saw marriage as,

[00:23:18] you know, part of the I guess religious establishment or whatever.

[00:23:23] So Sayers had this huge dilemma.

[00:23:25] She loved him, she desperately wanted to marry him.

[00:23:28] She wanted to have children.

[00:23:31] And so they separated because she wouldn't sleep with him outside of marriage.

[00:23:37] And then he left and came here, came to America and then wrote to her.

[00:23:43] I mean, months after they'd split up, not even a year.

[00:23:47] My goodness.

[00:23:47] Saying that he'd met somebody else and was getting married.

[00:23:51] Oh, actually.

[00:23:52] So the correspondence then continued.

[00:23:56] And he said that the whole thing had been a test from his point of view as to

[00:24:04] whether she would be willing to surrender her principles.

[00:24:07] Did she love him enough to surrender her principles and she hadn't?

[00:24:10] Essentially, she loved God more.

[00:24:13] Wow.

[00:24:13] She fell into obviously quite a serious, I mean, maybe depression,

[00:24:21] but definitely devastation.

[00:24:23] Right.

[00:24:24] And started going out with a motorbike mechanic and didn't love him and did

[00:24:34] sleep with him and became pregnant shockingly to her, obviously.

[00:24:41] And she kept the pregnancy a secret while she worked at the advertising agency.

[00:24:47] And so she just wore more and more kind of eluctrous clothes.

[00:24:53] OK, hide the bump.

[00:24:54] You're going to want to hear the second part of this because this is only the

[00:24:57] beginning. And so now you've got a little bit of the scandal.

[00:25:00] So we'll come back next week with part two of Dorothy Sayers with Dr.

[00:25:05] Amy Orr Ewing.

[00:25:11] Thank you for listening to Women Worth Knowing with Cheryl Brodersen

[00:25:14] and Robin Jones Gunn.

[00:25:16] For more information on Cheryl, visit Cheryl Brodersen.com or follow her

[00:25:20] on Instagram or Facebook.

[00:25:21] For more information on Robin, visit RobinGunn.com or follow her on Instagram

[00:25:26] or Facebook. Join us each week for a lively conversation as we explore

[00:25:30] the lives of well-known and not so well known historical and contemporary

[00:25:34] Christian women. If you think there is a woman worth knowing,

[00:25:38] we'd love to hear from you.

[00:25:39] Email us at www.cccm.com.

[00:25:45] We hope you've enjoyed today's episode.

[00:25:47] Make sure you rate us on your podcast app, subscribe and share it with a friend.

[00:25:51] Thank you again for listening to Women Worth Knowing with Cheryl Brodersen

[00:25:54] and Robin Jones Gunn.

[00:25:56] Women Worth Knowing is a production of Calvary Chapel Coast Amesa.