ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book positions Dorothy L. Sayers within the developing discussions of the English literary canon in the early twentieth-century, represented primarily by F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis. It illustrates that while Sayers may agree with some of their goals, she firmly resists their disdain for popular literature. The book examines Sayers's idea of charitable reading further by exploring how her literary interactions with Alfred Tennyson, one of the most maligned Victorian writers in the early twentieth century, model the type of charitable reading that is implicit within her overall argument in The Mind of the Maker. It describes Sayers's novel The Nine Tailors to investigate how she crafts the details, significance, sensation, and characterization in ways similar to Collins in The Moonstone and The Woman in White and to Charles Dickens in Bleak House.
