There are several ways in which “The Lost Tools of Learning” – a paper she gave in 1947 – is typical of Dorothy L Sayers: there is the bracing intellectual vigour, the combative willingness to take on received wisdom (consider her explanation of the angels dancing on a pinhead), and the defiant defence of religion, especially medieval religion. She was a non-conformist in her orthodoxy.
Dorothy L Sayers’ upbringing could have been designed to form a strongly individual character. She was the only child of the chaplain of Christ Church, Oxford, Henry Sayers, and his wife Mary Leigh, and her early childhood was spent in Oxford before her father moved to be vicar of a remote village in the Fens. She was educated at home until she was almost 16, when she was sent to school in Salisbury where she was miserable. But until then, she was the precocious only child in a household of affectionate adults. She had none of the inhibitions about a love of learning that might have resulted from being educated at a conventional school.
