"Dorothy and Jack" by Gina Dalfonzo

It may sound like a kind of heresy, but I read Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) before I read C.S. Lewis (1898-1963). In the 1970s, there was a revival of mysteries from the Golden Age (1920s-1940s, possibly including the 1950s). I was reading Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Margery Allingham, G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, and many others. I connected to Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey stories through Chesterton. In the late 1970s, I was reading Francis Schaeffer, and it was through Schaeffer that I began reading Lewis. 

While I came to know a lot about Lewis and the Inklings, and his friendship with Tolkien, what I didn’t know was the connection between Lewis and Sayers. One connecting point was Charles Williams, a sort of “add-on Inkling” who moved to Oxford with the University Press in 1940. He became great friends with Lewis, but not so much with Tolkien. It was Williams who inspired Sayers to undertake her translation of The Divine Comedy by Dante, although his death in 1945 happened before she began to publish.

 

The original connecting point was a fan letter written by Sayers to Lewis in 1942. For the next 15 years, until Sayers’ death in 1957, they developed and maintained a friendship nurtured in writing, faith, education, family background, interests, and philosophy. Gina Dalfonzo tells their story in Dorothy and Jack: The Transforming Friendship of Dorothy L. Sayers and C.S. Lewis, and she notes that it would be difficult to find a man and a woman more alike in virtually all aspects of their lives. 

 

Gina Dalfonzo

The story of their friendship is the story of two towering intellects who connected initially through that fan letter. Dalfonzo notes that the letter itself has been lost; we don’t know which of Lewis’s works inspired her to write. Lewis said that this letter was the first fan letter he received from someone famous.

 

Their correspondence continued and grew. It was a friendship of equals – equals in intellect, faith, and fame. Their correspondence and occasional face-to-face meetings continued. Dalfonzo ably guides us through their friendship, the letters, and the context of their meetings and discussions. As the meetings of the Inklings became more sporadic, Sayers may have provided the intellectual sounding board that Lewis thrived on. And vice versa. 

 

It's a wonderful book, filled with insights about both authors.

 

Dalfonzo is the author of One by One: Welcoming the Singles in Your Church and the editor of The Gospel in Dickens: Selections from His Works. She serves as a columnist at Christ & Pop Culture and is the founder and editor of Dickensblog, a “blog for all things Dickens.” She’s written for The Atlantic, Christianity Today, First Things, Weekly Standard, and Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, among many others. She received a B.S. degree in English from Messiah College and an M.A. degree in English from George Mason University. She lives in Virginia.

 

Dorothy and Jack is an important contribution to our understanding of not only both authors individually but to that overall climate in England in the 1940s and 1950s that did much to fan the flames of Christian faith on both sides of the Atlantic.