Mystery Writer, Scholar
1893 – 1957
Dossie is Dorothy L. Sayers, a renowned English crime writer, poet, playwright, essayist, translator and Christian humanist. She studied medieval literature at Oxford, being one of the first women to graduate from that university (1915).
She worked for several years as a copywriter for the London advertising firm Bensons (brands included Guinness, Coleman’s mustard) until she was able to support herself by the sale of her books and stories.
She created Lord Peter Wimsey, an English aristocrat and amateur sleuth who was the protagonist for a series of novels and short stories that were set between the First and Second World Wars. Her writings are still popular today.
Later on in her life, Dorothy Sayers gave up detective fiction to pursue her other interests which included writing stage plays (“The Zeal of Thy House,” “The Man Born to be King”), letters, articles, essays and books (including “Mind of the Maker”). She spent the last years of her life on an English translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Notable Quotables:
The literature of power… does not tell us anything we didn’t know before, but it works upon the great emotional forces which are in us already and by suggestion and illusion, and by the splendor of noble sound it stirs us up to respond to its stimulus, so that we really feel greater, wiser, more enthusiastic and altogether bigger people ,just in the same way that great music does.
***
For every work [or act] of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.
First, [not in time, but merely in order of enumeration] there is the Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning: and this is the image of the Father.
Second, there is the Creative Energy [or Activity] begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter: and this is the image of the Word.
Third, there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul: and this is the image of the indwelling Spirit.
Look for Dossie’s insightful blog posts in the AWSI Musings.
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