ABSTRACT
With The Nine Tailors, Sayers finally found a balance between the puzzle of the detective story and the thematic depth of a serious novel, and while many of her readers, both then and now, wish that she had continued along this path, she wrote only two more complete detective novels: Gaudy Night (1935) and Busman’s Honeymoon (1937). While the Wimsey Papers, which were published between November 1939 and January 1940 in The Spectator, and the fragment of Thrones, Dominations found among her papers after her death suggest that she had not abandoned Peter and Harriet completely, her growing interest in writing plays and the realities of World War II transformed Sayers as a writer. As a writer of detective fiction, she may have initially worried that she would not be taken seriously outside of that genre, but soon she no longer had that problem. In the years between the publication of The Nine Tailors in 1934 and the end of the broadcast of The Man Born to Be King in 1942, Sayers became, in Barbara Reynolds’s words, “a national figure. The public, the press, the B.B.C., the Church looked to her to make pronouncements.” 1 The woman once derided by Q. D. Leavis for her “literary glibness and spiritual illiteracy” 2 became an authoritative voice on the spiritual issues facing the nation. Sayers herself did not feel entirely comfortable in this new role, declaring in a letter to Rev. Eric Fenn in 1940, “I am not a prophet, but only a sort of painstaking explainer of official dogma.” 3 If we look closely at how several of her works from this time period echo the writings of the Victorian sages of the previous century, however, we must at the very least consider her a prophet within this tradition. Even as her role as an author shifts, Victorian writers still provide Sayers with the tactics she needs as she attempts to connect with her audience under increasingly trying circumstances.
