Dorothy L. Sayers

British · 1893 to 1957

Born Dorothy Leigh Sayers on June 13, 1893, at the Old Choir House in Brewer Street, Oxford, to the Reverend Henry Sayers, chaplain of Christ Church, and his wife Helen Leigh, she was four when her father took the rural living of Bluntisham-cum-Earith in the Cambridgeshire Fens. An only child taught Latin at six, French and German by governesses, she had run of her father's library and could read by four. At Godolphin School in Salisbury she was an outsider; at Somerville College, Oxford, she took a first in medieval French in 1915, although the university would not award degrees to women until 1920, when she returned to collect hers in absentia at one of the first such ceremonies. She worked as a copywriter at Benson's advertising agency, coining the slogan that toucans drink Guinness, and in 1923 bore an illegitimate son she raised at arm's length through her cousin Ivy. That same year she published Whose Body?, introducing the monocled aristocrat-detective Lord Peter Wimsey. Eleven Wimsey novels followed, the genre lifted out of the puzzle book and pulled toward the novel of manners. In Strong Poison (1930) Wimsey saved the detective novelist Harriet Vane from the gallows; in Gaudy Night (1935), set in a fictional Oxford women's college, he finally asked her to marry him in Latin. From the mid-1930s Sayers turned to religious drama, her radio play cycle The Man Born to Be King (1941-1942) provoking outrage and then admiration. She spent her last fifteen years translating Dante's Divine Comedy into colloquial English terza rima, dying suddenly at her home in Witham, Essex, on December 17, 1957, at sixty-four, the Paradiso unfinished.