Dorothy Leigh Sayers
13 June 1893
Oxford, England
17 December 1957 (aged 64)
Witham, Essex, England
- Novelist
- playwright
- critic
- Crime fiction
- Translation of Dante
- Christian writings
1
Born in Oxford, Sayers was brought up in rural East Anglia and educated at Godolphin School in Salisbury and Somerville College, Oxford, graduating with first class honours in medieval French. She worked as an advertising copywriter between 1922 and 1929 before success as an author brought her financial independence. Her first novel, Whose Body?, was published in 1923. Between then and 1939 she wrote ten more novels featuring the upper-class amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. In 1930, in Strong Poison, she introduced a leading female character, Harriet Vane, the object of Wimsey's love. Harriet appears sporadically in future novels, resisting Lord Peter's proposals of marriage until Gaudy Night in 1935, six novels later.
Sayers moved the genre of detective fiction away from pure puzzles lacking characterisation or depth, and became recognised as one of the four "Queens of Crime" of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, along with Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh. She was a founder member of the Detection Club, and worked with many of its members in producing novels and radio serials collaboratively, such as the novel The Floating Admiral in 1931.
From the mid‐1930s Sayers wrote plays, mostly on religious themes; they were performed in English cathedrals and broadcast by the BBC. Her radio dramatisation of the life of Jesus, The Man Born to Be King (1941–42), initially provoked controversy but was quickly recognised as an important work. From the early 1940s her main preoccupation was translating the three books of Dante's Divine Comedy into colloquial English. She died unexpectedly at her home in Essex, aged 64, before completing the third book.
Life and career[edit]
Early years[edit]
Sayers was born on 13 June 1893 at the Old Choir House in Brewer Street, Oxford; she was the only child of the Rev Henry Sayers and his wife Helen "Nell" Mary, née Leigh.[3] Henry Sayers, born at Tittleshall, Norfolk, was the son of the Rev Robert Sayers, from County Tipperary, Ireland.[4][5] At the time of Sayers's birth her father was headmaster of Christ Church Cathedral School and chaplain of Christ Church, one of the colleges of the University of Oxford.[5] Her mother, born in Shirley, Hampshire, was a daughter of a solicitor descended from landed gentry on the Isle of Wight.[6] Sayers was proud of the Leigh connection and later considered calling herself "D. Leigh Sayers" in professional matters, before settling for "Dorothy L. Sayers"—insisting on the inclusion of the middle initial.[7]
