Author: Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born in 1893 in Oxford, the only child of the chaplain of Christ Church, and grew up in the East Anglian Fens after her father took up a country parish. She read Modern Languages at Somerville College, Oxford, was among the first women to receive an Oxford degree when the university began awarding them in 1920, and held jobs as a teacher, a publisher's reader, and a copywriter at the London advertising agency Benson's before establishing herself as a full-time writer.She wrote her first Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Whose Body?, in 1923, partly for money. Over the next fourteen years she produced eleven Wimsey novels and several short story collections, ending with Busman's Honeymoon in 1937. The books grew steadily more ambitious. The early novels are tight Golden Age puzzles. Gaudy Night, near the end of the sequence, is a serious novel about women's intellectual lives that happens to contain a mystery. The character of Harriet Vane, introduced in Strong Poison and finally married to Peter in Busman's Honeymoon, is widely taken as a portrait of Sayers herself.The second half of her career moved away from detective fiction entirely. Sayers had been a serious Christian her entire adult life, and from the late 1930s onwards she wrote religious drama, theological essays, and finally a translation of Dante's Divine Comedy that she did not live to complete (Barbara Reynolds finished it after her death). The plays The Man Born to Be King for the BBC and her essays on dogma still get read in Anglican circles. She had a son she kept secret most of her life. She died in 1957 of a stroke at her Witham home. Her detective fiction has stayed in print continuously since the 1930s, and Gaudy Night in particular is now taught regularly in university literature courses.