Gina Dalfonzo’s book focuses on the underexplored friendship between Dorothy L. Sayers and C.S. Lewis. I’ve read a biography about the Inklings before, but this was the first time I’ve ready anything about Sayers. Although not a comprehensive biography of either author, this book gives a brief look at both authors’ lives and shows their interesting friendship. Dorothy and Jack is also in conversation with Aimee Byrd’s Why Can’t We Be Friends, as it critiques Christian culture that views friendship between men and women as dangerous. Dalfonzo uses this book to show the relationship between Sayers and Lewis as an example of healthy Christian friendship. This was a quick and enjoyable read, and it was great to learn more about the relationship between these two passionate and intellectual writers.

*Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review

I´ll be honest: I just took this book because I like C.S. Lewis and because the question about the friendship between Dorothy and Him... it was real, obviously, it was possible, but was it healthy? Have you ever had a real good friend who was just interested in you because of you, because of your mind, your thoughts and not because he had or wanted to develop deeper feelings for you (romantic ones to be specific?) There is a lot of different opinion about this topic and not everyone agrees in this issue. It was truly interesting to read about C.S. Lewis´s friendships, everything around books, words, ideas, and sharing dreams it is so interesting and inspiring to me. I love letters, I had a pen pal relationship with friends for years and the sensation of getting a tangible letter in my mailbox it is trilling and I get over-excited about it. I wish I could have a friend like that now (girl or boy it doesn´t matter, just one that loves God, His Word and wants to respect and know also my family, husband, and 2 children). I believe God created every one of us differently so we could learn from each other. Not every relationship is going to be as close as theirs, but I´m sure you are going to be very inspired and longing for closeness as you read this book. I won´t spoil you the book, but I just think Dorothy was way beyond her years and she was a free mind kind of rebel girl, I believe she shook Lewis world, and he gave her stability too, let me know what you think if you read it. I wish I could have a writting club like them... sights. I wish my children have deep relationships to grow, dream, learn, fly and leave a legacy.

Goodreads review
As some reviewers have said, this book was a bit slow to get going, perhaps I had this perception as the first part consisted of short bios of Lewis and Sayers. Although I must admit the parallels of their lives were pretty interesting, I have read several bios of each and knew most of the biographical information. Where this book really shines is in its explanation of what each gave to the other. I loved how each appreciated, admired and even emulated the other. Yet they were secure in who they were and in what they aspired to write. This friendship between a intelligent man and an equally intelligent woman was refreshing in this age of sexual suspicion. My only complaint is that I would have loved to have had even more of their letters to read.

I don't normally read biographies. Histories I find interesting, but am not drawn to the biographies of people, no matter how important. But I love the writings of both of these people and knew a little about the Inklings and wondered about the friendship between this married woman and bachelor.

This book talks a lot about their writings and about mutual friends. We learn what made Sayers and Lewis the people they became and how each one influenced the other in life and work. Amazingly, the friendship grew through correspondence and they actually had very little face to face time with each other.

I certainly learned things about their writings that I had not known in the past, but mainly I was drawn into the deep respect and friendship they had for one another. A true love of friends!

It is no spoiler that in the end they both died. But I felt such a profound sense of loss when Dorothy died! I could feel Jack's (Lewis) grief as I read. And shortly after Dorothy's death, his own wife of four years died. He died 3 years later. I was in tears at the loss of these two that I had never felt before.

It is possible for readers to idolize favorite authors. In this book we learn that they were people just like us - they had many things that influenced their lives. We begin to understand why they made choices that they made and how those things would show forth in their writings.

I can't recommend this book enough to people. If for no other reason than to show the world that it is possible for men and women to be true friends with one another no matter what the movie "When Harry Met Sally" might try to tell you!

Reading Dorothy and Jack made these two amazing writers come to life for me. 4.5 stars.

There are not many books about great friendships between a man and a woman. They are either shallow or end in romance. This book truly stand out and so do the lives of the two well-known and well-loved literary giants: C. S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers.

I approached the book with a mix of excitement and hesitancy. But, I need not have worried. While I didn't love the beginning, I absolutely LOVED the ending. (I may have even shed a tear or two.)

I had just read Strong Poison, Gaudy Night, and Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society by D. L. Sayers - brilliant detective novels and a fantastic essay on feminism.
I am also currently reading The Horse and His Boy, An Experiment in Criticism, and Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis - a most wonderful fairy tale, a life-changing work of literary criticism, and a compelling apologetic work.
So, I knew some of their work but I didn't know them.

Reading Dorothy and Jack made these two amazing writers come to life for me. I have not read any other biographies about Lewis or Sayers yet, but this book showed a very personal side of them. I knew a little bit about their letters though. That is why I appreciate this biography all the more. Because Dalfonzo does a great job putting their letters and their friendship in a context and she does this in such a beautiful way that now Lewis and Sayers feel like friends to me. Friends I never met, but who I have begun to love dearly and yes, when the book ended and so did their lives, I was not yet ready to say goodbye.

I simply loved this book. It hooks you in and doesn't let you go. Dalfonzo does an incredible job of bringing forth the unique and lifelong friendship between Sayers and Lewis! It is refreshing to read about how men and women can simply be friends, with no hint of more, and yet profoundly impact the other's life. For fans of Sayers or Lewis (or both!) this book gets beneath the veneer of what you think you know and brings both authors to life.

Friends, I loved this book! I had no idea what to expect when I joined the Dorothy and Jack launch team, but taking this journey through the friendship between these great minds was a real treat.

Ms. Dalfonzo's book is short, but critical examination of the oft overlooked friendship between Dorothy Sayers and C.S. Lewis. The question of their mutual impact on one another is explored throughout the book, in addition to other critical questions that apply to our lives as believers in Christ. If you are interested in learning more about two of the most prolific authors of the last century, this is a book I would heartily recommend to you.

Thank you so much to the author and publisher for the free review copy! I’m so thrilled to join in the launch team to celebrate this wonderful book. It’s a snappy, informative, and engaging read about two of my favorite authors.⁣
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I love C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series and Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter mysteries but I had absolutely no idea they were friends. This book shines a light on that powerful friendship while also examining general themes about friendship, writing, art, and creativity. The biography aspect to this book was very fascinating and I admit I was rather shocked by certain revelations as I knew very little about these authors and their lives. (Petition for Dalfonzo to write full length biographies for both!) It gave me a new appreciation for their work. (And maybe I need to read Dante now? That really is high praise!)⁣
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I also loved how the author connected the themes of Dorothy and Jack’s relationship with modern issues. The author’s insights are profound and thought-provoking. I was especially affected by Dorothy and Jack’s discussion about creativity and the purpose behind their writing. These are timeless themes and we could all learn a little from their example. I’m very glad it has become my latest 5 star read of 2020 and I highly recommend it.⁣

When I was in Uni I went through a Sayers phase. I read everything: her essays, her biographies... I was determined to find in her all of the strong questions I had that railed against the rather tame view of women from my sheltered minister's kid upbringing. She was smart. She was assertive and yet she flashed her faith in such a spirited and natural way. She was acerbic and railed and debated and questioned.


I, of course, fell for Peter and Harriet ( mostly Harriet) and my love deepened.

Lewis, on the other hand, always existed as someone not unlike the many, many guest speakers my mom hosted for Sunday lunch at our house after a long morning at my dad's church. I knew of him and his teachings but I felt disconnected.


But Sayers.... Sayers meeting Lewis bridged my two worlds: the world of the university woman in classes and libraries forging a faith outside of expectation and tradition of a minister's household and the philosophy and teachings quoted often and splashed across my father's home and church office libraries.


I tucked Dorothy Sayers into my pocket as an honourary Inkling. Someone who could speak for me but bridge the world that my dad and his guest speakers inhabited.


In Dorothy and Jack, that world is reconciled. With Dalfonzo's easy and accessible tone ( not ever once detracting from her remarkable intelligence and deep research), we are pulled into the spher eof two minds who battled the greatest questions of faith and theology.


Herein, Dorothy and Jack draws a welcoming line between gender questions and rooted in history and biography allows us to see how their magnificent minds complimented each other, challenged each other and uplifted each other.

Their discourse is an inspiration in an age of immediate cancel culture and a propensity to nose-dive quickly into argument.

Their balance is at the center of this moving and informative tale.



With humour and warmth, Dalfonzo invites us to tea with two of the greatest minds of the 20th Century (and beyond). Not shying from their faults but happy to spotlight their strengths, this marriage of consciousness and deep understanding is a balm in the midst of a world too eager to sever any tentative divides before they can flourish from sometimes dissonant to altogether enriching.


Also, OMG with the research! my mind reels at the depth and care taken here.


also shared on insta and twitter!

I have enjoyed the works of C.S. Lewis since I was a small child, and have only recently discovered the joys of Dorothy L. Sayers mystery novels, although she has quickly become of of my favorites, so this book was a delightful journey into the lives and friendship an author I have loved for years, and one I have newly learned to love. The book starts off with a brief biography of Sayers and Lewis individually up until the time that they first started corresponding; it then dives into their friendship and the ways that friendship grew and changed them both over the years.

While reading books by an author is a great way to "get to know them", I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know Dorothy and Jack (as they are referenced throughout the book) on a different level, hearing their thoughts that had not been combed over by editors and publishers, but simply speaking with a friend. Gina Dalfonzo did an excellent job researching and using many excerpts of letters between the friends, as well as supplying the context of the lives of both Jack and Dorothy at the time the letters were written. While this book was written over 60 years after the deaths of Sayers and Lewis, it gives fresh insight into two of my favorite 20th century authors.

The author did a good job pulling in all sorts of information that made for an informative read. It is interesting that Dorothy and Jack and others debated philosophically without searching the Scriptures. Pitting the church against society and throwing a little experience in here and there strikes me as hollow. Some of Dorothy's choices made me VERY sad. Although I thoroughly enjoyed reading through the references in the back of the book and and enjoyed reading Sherwood Wirt's interview with Lewis.

I love DLS and C.S. Lewis individually as authors, and it was such a joy to learn more about the two of them and their friendship! The book was clearly and beautifully written, and both their friendship and their personalities shown through.

It’s been a while since I wrote a book review, and this is a great book to start that again.

First, let me start with some of my history with C. S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers. I began reading Lewis around 7th grade. But not the Narnia books. Oh no. I read Mere Christianity and the Problem of Pain. It took quite a few years for me to really enjoy fantasy. But once I did, the Narnia books become an annual reread for me. Still is.

By college I had read everything I could find of Lewis’s, and he had begun to lead me to other authors. Tolkien, of course. George MacDonald. Charles Williams. And then Dorothy Sayers. I loved the Lord Peter books. Her mysteries were better than Agatha Christi’s (there, I said it!) I relished her plays. But I didn’t quite understand who this author was. What was the connection between mysteries plays about the life of Christ, Dante, and apologetics?

The book Dorothy and Jack by Gina Dalfanzo helped me understand Dorothy Sayers a bit more. And it helped me see the importance their friendship played in each other’s life..

This is one reason I loved this book so much. It isn’t a typical biography. It is a biography of a friendship. Often we don’t see the value of friendships in our lives. We might not think of them as being formative in who we are, in what we think. Dalfanzo’s book, by highlighting the friendship of these two brilliant minds, also highlights the importance of friendship in our own lives.
https://somethoughtsbysheri.wordpress.com/2020/07/27/book-review-of-dorothy-and-jack/

"In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out."— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

I remember being surprised and interested to learn that Dorothy Sayers and C.S. Lewis were friends who exchanged comments about writing and many other things in their acquaintance. I was intrigued by the idea of what the famous mystery writer and a famous Inkling had to discuss. That's because, while I knew a lot about C.S. Lewis's life, I knew only the basics about Dorothy Sayers. I'd forgotten that when she'd taken the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries as far as she felt she could, Sayers turned to writing theological books and plays, translating Dante, and in general serving her Christian faith. So, of course, she and Lewis were on the same path.

This book does a good job of tracking their friendship, what it meant to each of them, and how they supported and critiqued each other's work. It also does a good job of giving brief but comprehensive biographies for each, so I learned a lot more about Sayers' life. And, in the context of that friendship, it helped me see C.S. Lewis more clearly.

There is an emphasis throughout holding up Sayers' and Lewis's friendship as an ideal proving that men and women can be friends without succumbing to sexual attraction. The idea that my friendship with a man would lead to us automatically flinging ourselves into each other's arms was a very strange idea to me. I understand prudently keeping an eye on anything that might strike a spark. It is a very rare circumstance in my experience. I actually tend to have as many male as female friends. However, I discovered it is evidently a well known assumption in some Evangelical circles. So much so that you should've seen the Facebook page for the book launch light up with passionate (haha) arguments about the book promoting incorrect ideas. It doesn't detract from the book overall but it is an odd thread woven throughout. And I suppose if this is a thing you care about, then this book will be of extra interest.

All things considered, I enjoyed filling in the story of these strong-minded but mutually respectful famous friends. Their friendship is the sort that I have with a few people myself and I liked reading it.

I devoured this book in a single afternoon. I've been a fan of C. S. Lewis since the first time my parents read The Chronicles of Narnia to me as a child, but I haven't ever read any of Sayers' work. Despite that deficit in my reading background, this exploration of the deep friendship between Dorothy and Jack was a pleasure to read. I very much appreciated the way Dalfonzo celebrates platonic male-female friendships, particularly when it's possible that, given the current cultural climate, those friendships might be even harder to forge and maintain than they were in the middle of the 20th century. Although Dalfonzo clearly loves her subjects, she doesn't hesitate to point out their flaws and foibles, which not only gives a clearer picture of their true personalities, it also lends credence to her praise of their strengths and virtues. Dorothy and Jack's friendship seems to have been a true case of iron sharpening iron, of a man and woman treating each other as siblings in Christ, and we should all hope to be so blessed.

I found Dorothy and Jack to be a delightful, scholarly look at the friendship between two of the greatest creative minds of the twentieth century: Dorothy Sayers and C.S. Lewis. Gina Dalfonzo writes as one who understands well the lives and contexts of these beloved literary heroes, connecting the dots of their friendship and tracing their mutual influence upon each other’s work. While some might debate generalizations about cross-gender friendships, I hope that doesn’t deter them from experiencing this well-researched account of an actual, God-honoring one.

This book was beautifully captivating. I loved the correspondence and friendship between Dorothy L. Sayers and C. S. Lewis. I highly recommend this delightful read.

With affection and a thoroughly respectable amount of research, Gina Dalfonzo has written a delightful ode to a delightful friendship. I have to admit, I've never been the biggest C.S. Lewis fan, but now I feel like I see him in a new light. I'm gratified that an evangelical titan like he not only supported her but also made himself accountable to her - taking what she dished out with a listening ear, heeding her criticism, and allowing himself to be shaped by her. And concurrently, I imagine DLS must have been so relieved to have someone who took her seriously and despite what Dalfonzo shows to be limitations in his view of women, did not limit Sayers to her sex. I know, from this book as well as from my own reading, that DLS was a lot to take in but having Lewis to keep up with her and to be her intellectual equal would have been such a boon to her. I loved seeing the growth in friendship and the life of the mind the two of them experienced together through their correspondence. As a result, I am reconsidering how I think of Lewis.

Moreover, Dalfonzo has not left the two in a vacuum. Through thorough research into their correspondence as well as academic, social, and literary contexts around them, she connects Lewis and Sayers and their developing schemas to a whole host of other luminaries: Charles Williams, G.K. Chesterton, the other Inklings, Joy Davidman, and more all also make cameos in the book. Such positioning also illuminates Lewis and Sayers' position amongst the other Christian intellectuals of the day, which is useful for theorizing their impact in their context.

Two points of contention, neither of which really detract from the readability of the book but did trip me up a bit. First, the summary seems to suggest that the point of fleshing out their friendship is to make an argument about the possibility of having healthy male-female relationships that don't slide into eros. While Dalfonzo does make the occasional comment on the topic (I found one comment on developing the idea of a category of friendship worthy of the same kind of importance as other kinds of love particularly thought-provoking and insightful) but these are never really more than asides. I kept waiting to see when there would be a fuller discussion of their friendship in relation to the topic and how we can use it to develop our thinking, but it never came, which is a pity. There's certainly enough fodder for discussion there.

Secondly, Dalfonzo refers to them as Dorothy and Jack, which I could never get comfortable with. I fully concede to being a product of my upbringing and of perpetually having my head stuck in some academic book for my studies, but it feels impertinent to call peers by their first name unless given permission. From a discussion with Dalfonzo on social media. I know she chose to steer away from the formality of last names and the potential for confusion from initials, but perhaps it's the very depth of her research that makes this informality seem an odd choice. The book is rigorously researched, but perhaps the informal naming tips the tone of the book from, say, reflectively academic to, perhaps, a bit too familiar. (It would be fair to say I'm old-fashioned!)

Nevertheless, I did truly enjoy this book, both for the quality of work and for the obvious affection Dalfonzo has for Sayers and Lewis. I should rather like to be friends, I think, with the author.

*Many thanks to the author and publisher for providing an eARC of this book. This is my honest review*

It’s almost hard to review this book as a work by an author, and not for the history it tells. Gina Dalfonzo does such an amazing job of presenting the friendship between CS Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers without intruding in the relationship too much. It’s as if Dalfonzo has brought out a box of the letters between these two literary giants and is sharing each one with you in the order they were written, while also providing context of what would have been going when these letters were written.

The book is brilliantly written, using the correspondence between Dorothy and Jack as an outline. And I love that Dalfonzo chooses to refer to them both by their names because it humanizes them. You feel like these are two regular human beings who happen to be fantastic writers but also warm friends. Which is exactly who they were, so it feels right.

Both Dorothy and Jack feel like complete people here. They aren’t *just* Christian apologists or *just* fiction writers or *just* academics or *just* any other role in their personal lives you wish to focus on. Everything is mentioned here, from family to friendships to professional relationships to matters of faith. It’s a biography of two remarkable people, as well as an examination of their friendship. After reading this, I feel like I’ve been a fly-on-the-wall witnessing an honest and beautiful friendship and I feel all the more enriched for it.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of Dorothy L. Sayers or CS Lewis (or both!), or if you wonder if men and women can simply be platonic friends (short answer: it can definitely be done), or if you just enjoy good biographical nonfiction. For me, this was a palate cleanser and a boost out of the reading slump I’ve been in.