Dorothy L. Sayers

Lore & Background

Dorothy L. Sayers was born in Oxford in 1893, the only child of a clergyman and schoolmaster. She spent her childhood in rural East Anglia after her father became a rector there. Her early years were fairly solitary, with few children of her own age nearby, though her parents were loving. She learned to read by age four and made extensive use of her father’s library.

Schooling

Educated chiefly at home, she began Latin before turning seven and had governesses for French and German. At fifteen she was sent to Godolphin School in Salisbury, where she acted in plays and played violin and viola, but was unhappy due to feeling like an outsider and disliking the school’s low-church religious atmosphere. A severe case of measles during an outbreak in 1911 nearly killed her, causing temporary baldness.

She recovered to win a Gilchrist Scholarship, which funded her study of modern languages at Somerville College, Oxford, where she graduated with first-class honours in medieval French. After university, she worked as an advertising copywriter from 1922 to 1929 before achieving financial independence through her writing. Her first novel, Whose Body?, appeared in 1923, introducing the aristocratic amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey. She wrote ten more Wimsey novels through 1939, and in Strong Poison (1930) introduced Harriet Vane, a female character who becomes the object of Wimsey’s affections.

1930–1934

Harriet appears in later novels, resisting his proposals until Gaudy Night (1935). Sayers transformed detective fiction by moving beyond pure puzzles to include characterisation and depth. She was recognised as one of the four “Queens of Crime” of the Golden Age, alongside Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh.

A founder member of the Detection Club, she collaborated on collaborative works such as The Floating Admiral (1931). From the mid-1930s she wrote religious plays performed in English cathedrals and broadcast by the BBC. Her radio dramatisation of Jesus’s life, The Man Born to Be King (1941–42), initially controversial, became regarded as important. From the early 1940s she focused on translating Dante’s Divine Comedy into colloquial English, but died unexpectedly at her Essex home in 1957, aged 64, before finishing the third book.

Did You Know?

• She co-founded the Mutual Admiration Society at Oxford, a forerunner of the Inklings.
• She was ineligible for a degree from Oxford until the university changed its rules in 1920.