Dorothy Sayers, Writer, Translator, Scholar

Dorothy L. Sayers (died 17 December 1957)

Born on 13 June 1893, the scholar, poet, and novelist Dorothy L. Sayers is best known for her series of detective novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and his inimitable manservant and assistant, Bunter.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Sayers's father was headmaster of the choir school at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and she was born there, in the headmaster's house. 

In 1912, she would earn a scholarship to Somerville College (named for Mary Fairfax Somerville, who was Ada Lovelace's tutor). Sayers would complete her education with first-class honors in 1915--although women were not awarded Oxford degrees at the time.

I had thought that I would write about Sayers's detective novels today, since that is how I first encountered her. As a graduate student, I would save up my money and, when I had enough, I would buy the next volume in the series (I still have those paperbacks, published by Avon Books in the 60s). 

I changed my mind, though, after I looked briefly at the Sayers entry in Wikipedia with this blithe assertion: "Although women could not be awarded degrees at that time [1915], Sayers was among the first to receive a degree when the position changed a few years later."

Okay, I guess. But it wasn't quite that simple. So I thought I'd go back a bit to Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, about which I blogged earlier this year. Brittain, too, had attended Somerville College, her studies there interrupted by the outbreak of the first world war. She writes in some detail about the terrible struggle for women to be awarded the degrees they had earned--imagine, if you will, having fulfilled all the requirements for a college degree, but not being given the diploma you had earned. 

"The fight for Degrees for Women at Oxford had always been closely connected with the feminist movement as a whole," she begins, "and in 1919 it shared in the impetus given everywhere to the women's cause by the ending of the War." 

By July of 1919 (the war had ended at 11:00 a.m. on 11 November 1918), there was what Brittain called "a regular chorus of praise of women's war-work." On 22 July, the House of Commons passed a second reading of the "Sex Disqualification (Removal) Bill," which stated: 

A person shall not be disqualified by sex or marriage from the exercise of any public function, or from being appointed to or holding any civil or judicial office or post, or from entering or assuming or carrying on any civil profession or vocation. 

The act became law on 23 December 1919. One of its clauses specified that, in Brittain's words, "nothing in the statutes or charter of any university should be deemed to preclude the authorities of such university from admitting women to its membership." 

Already, by the end of November, those at Oxford advocating for degrees for women had begun to take heart, assuming that, once the Sex Disqualification Bill was passed, women would be awarded their Oxford degrees in the next term.  

But, there was opposition, and lots of harrumphing in outraged letters to the Times. How dare women seek to take advantage of the war? If women were "admitted to full membership of the university," there would certainly need to be "stricter discipline than is at present in force."

The "explosive ebullitions of feminine wrath" did not spur the university (or the Times) to move quickly. The next term (Hilary term, January through March) saw a discussion of a new statute granting degrees to women, but the university did not pass its statute until 11 May 1920, with the the statute "com[ing] into force" on 7 October 1920.

What followed was "the matriculation of nearly a thousand women"--women who had fulfilled the requirements for degrees but had never received them, including Vera Brittain herself, along with women "whose hair had grown grey in the process of training generations of girls to educate and work for their still handicapped sex." 

14 October 1920, Brittain "joined the crowds of young women in the Sheldonian Theatre to see the first Degree-giving in which women had taken part":

the excited atmosphere was tense with the consciousness of a dream fulfilled which had first been dreamt years before these feminine Masters and Bachelors were born, by women long dead--women who did not care whether they saw the end so long as they had contributed to the means. . . . 

          When the men . . . had received their Degrees, renewed cheers echoed wildly to the vaulted roof as the first women stood before the Vice-Chancellor; among them w[as] Dorothy L. Sayers. . . . Even the unchanging passivity of Oxford beneath the hand of the centuries must surely, I thought, be a little stirred by the sight of the women's gowns and caps. . . .

Those gowns and caps--the "visible signs of a profound revolution." 

So, yes, Sayers was among nearly a thousand women who had earned but not received degrees--and five long years after "the position changed" (you have to love the passive, indirect construction here), Dorothy Sayers received the degree the university had refused to award her in 1915.

Dorothy Sayers published poetry, the Wimsey novels and a great deal of short fiction, a translation of The Divine Comedy, works on theology, plays, and essays, including my favorite, "Are Women Human?" She also worked in advertising for nearly ten years for the S. H. Benson agency.

The 1933 cover of Sayers's detective novel,
set in an advertising agency.

If Don Draper and his pals were so compelling as "mad men," what might Sayers have to say about the business? Check out her 1933 Wimsey novel, Murder Must Advertise.

Here's a great piece on Sayers by Jane Curran, posted for the BBC Oxford, "Dorothy L. Sayers' Life and Loves." Curran objects to the kind of picture of Sayers that I have posted above, which presents Sayers as "a moonfaced, heavily built, bespectacled elderly woman in mannish clothes."

Curran says that like it's a bad thing . . . 

Ada Lovelace, "The Enchantress of Numbers"

Augusta Ada Gordon King, countess of Lovelace (born 10 December 1815)

Ada Lovelace, as she is now most commonly remembered, was the daughter of George Gordon, lord Byron, and his wife, Anne Isabella Milbanke. The poet and his new bride were famously ill-matched, their marriage nothing short of a disaster. After a year, the pair separated in January 1816, just a month after their daughter's birth (Byron seems to have been positive the baby would be a boy). Byron left England four months later and never saw his daughter again.

An 1836 painting of
Augusta Ada Gordon King,
by Margaret Sarah Carpenter

Ada's upbringing was shaped--or perhaps marred--by her mother's intense fear that her daughter would in any way resemble her father. Convinced that Byron was not only immoral but insane, Annabella Milbanke devised a plan of education for her Ada that would eliminate the dangerous effects of poetry and focus, instead, on mathematics, logic, and science.

Ada proved an apt pupil. (One of her correspondents and mentors was the mathematician and scientist Mary Fairfax Somerville--who was nominated to the Royal Academy of Science at the same time as Caroline Herschel and for whom Somerville College [Oxford] is named).

Ada also developed an ongoing partnership with the mathematician Charles Babbage, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge and inventor of the difference machine, a complex calculating device. They had begun their correspondence in 1833, when she was just seventeen. 

On 8 July 1835, when she was nineteen years old, Ada married William King, 8th Baron King (he later inherited the Lovelace title). She gave birth to three children, but in addition to her domestic life, she continued with her mathematical studies. Her working relationship with Babbage continued and developed after her marriage and the birth of her children. It is her work with Babbage and his later and more complex calculator, the Analytical Engine. that has drawn the most attention to Ada Lovelace. (It was Babbage who called Ada the "enchantress of numbers.")

At Babbage's request, Ada Lovelace translated an article on the Analytical Engine by the Italian engineer and mathematician Federico Luigi Menabrea, with the aim of publishing Menabrea's description in England. (Although Menabrea was Italian and his article was in large part based on a lecture Babbage had delivered in Turin, the piece was written in French.)

To her translation, Lovelace appended a series of notes, A through G, her notes three times as long as the Menabrea article she translated. These notes represent her contributions to mathematics in general and to computers and computing in particular.

Ada Lovelace, Diagram for the computation of Bernoulli numbers from note G –
The first published computer algorithm (1842)

In the last of these notes, G, Lovelace described a set of operations for Babbage's Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. (I have no idea what Bernoulli numbers are, and even after reading about them I am stumped, so I won't attempt to explain them.) What is important, however, is that Lovelace's note is regarded as the first algorithm designed to be used on a "computer." As the entry for Ada Lovelace at the Computer History Museum describes Lovelace's contribution, it represents the "first published description of a stepwise sequence of operations for solving certain mathematical problems and Ada is often referred to as 'the first programmer.'" (The United States Department of Defense named its computer language Ada in her honor, its standard document acronym MIL-STD-1815 referring to the year of her birth.)

More important, however, are Lovelace's recognitions of the possibilities for the Analytic Engine beyond the purely computational. Again, quoting the Computer History Museum assessment, her reflections are "visionary":

She speculated that the Engine "might act upon other things besides number. . . . [T]the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent." The idea of a machine that could manipulate symbols in accordance with rules and that number could represent entities other than quantity mark the fundamental transition from calculation to computation. Ada was the first to explicitly articulate this notion and in this she appears to have seen further than Babbage. She has been referred to as "prophet of the computer age." Certainly she was the first to express the potential for computers outside mathematics. 

Ada Lovelace is today widely recognized and appreciated--there are many biographies, websites (I like Finding Ada: Celebrating the Achievements of Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths and the Ada Initiative: Supporting Women in Open Technology and Culture--although this site, unfortunately, shut down in October 2015, while keeping the archive available), stickers, necklaces, coffee mugs, and even a graphic novel, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage.

And there is an Ada Lovelace Day, celebrating women's achievements in science, technology, and mathematics. (My post for Ada Lovelace Day 2015 is here.)

But there is also more than a little resistance to crediting Ada Lovelace with contributing to the development of computers and computing. (That's why I've linked to the Computer History Museum here--nothing like recognition for Ada Lovelace coming straight from Mountain View, CA, with video promos for the museum and its exhibits featuring Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak.) For an interesting essay on the resistance, check out the Ada Initiative's exploration of the issue, "Deleting Ada Lovelace from the History of Computing," by clicking here. (The original post has been deleted—here’s a link to the essay as preserved by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.)

Ada Lovelace died on 27 November 1852, just days before her thirty-seventh birthday.