Sayers, Dorothy Leigh

(1893–1957)

   Novelist, Playwright and Devotional Writer.

   Sayers was born in Oxford, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. She was educated at the University of Oxford and is primarily remembered as the creator of the aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. She abandoned that form of fiction in the 1940s and concentrated on translating dante’s Divina Commedia. She also wrote a series of religious radio plays, The Man Born to be King, and a play for Canterbury Cathedral, The Zeal of thy House. She was a highly intelligent apologist for Christian doctrine and did much to explain the Church’s message in a way that was attractive to her contemporaries.

   J. Brabazon, Dorothy L. Sayers: The Life of a Courageous Woman (1981);

   B. Reynolds, The Life and Soul of Dorothy Sayers (1993).