Early years , Huntingdonshire, where Sayers's father was rector during her childhood|alt=exterior view of church with tall spire Sayers was born on 13 June 1893 at the Old Choir House in
Brewer Street, Oxford; she was the only child of the Henry Sayers and his wife Helen "Nell" Mary, Leigh. Henry Sayers, born at
Tittleshall, Norfolk, was the son of the Rev Robert Sayers, from
County Tipperary, Ireland. Her mother, born in
Shirley, Hampshire, was a daughter of a solicitor descended from
landed gentry on the
Isle of Wight. 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. When Sayers was four years old her father accepted the post of
rector of
Bluntisham-cum-Earith in the
Fen Country of
East Anglia. The appointment carried a better
stipend than the Christ Church posts and the large
rectory had considerably more room than the family's house in Oxford, but the move cut them off from the city's lively social scene. This affected the rector and his wife differently: he was scholarly and self-effacing; she, like many of the Leigh family—including her great-uncle
Percival Leigh, a contributor to the humorous magazine
Punch—was outgoing and gregarious and she missed the stimulation of Oxford society. In the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), Catherine Kenney writes that the lack of siblings and neighbouring children of her own age or class made Sayers's childhood fairly solitary, although her parents were loving and attentive. Sayers formed one lasting friendship in these years: Ivy Shrimpton, eight years her senior, her first cousin as Nell's niece. Shrimpton, raised in
California as an infant but educated in an
Anglican convent school in Oxford, made extended visits to the Bluntisham rectory. Kenney writes that the two formed a lifelong friendship through "a youthful sharing of books, imagination, and confidences". Otherwise, Kenney comments, Sayers, "like many future authors ... lived largely a life of books and stories". She could read by the age of four, and made full use of her father's extensive library as she grew up. Despite some excellent teachers, Sayers was not happy at the school. Joining at the age of fifteen, rather than the school's normal starting age of eight, she was seen as an outsider by some of the other girls, and not all the staff approved of her independence of mind. As an Anglican with strong
high-church views, she was repelled by the form of Christianity practised at Godolphin, described by her biographer
James Brabazon as "a low-church
pietism, drab and mealy-mouthed", which came close to putting her off religion completely. During an outbreak of
measles at the school in 1911 Sayers nearly died, and as a result went temporarily bald and took to wearing wigs. Her mother was allowed to stay at the school, where she nursed her daughter, who recovered in time to study and sit for a
Gilchrist Scholarship, which she was awarded in March 1912. Among the purposes of these scholarships was to sponsor women to study at university colleges. Sayers's scholarship, worth £50 a year for three years, enabled her to study modern languages at
Somerville College, Oxford.
Oxford The all-women college of Somerville suited well, according to Kenney, because of its practice of cultivating its students to take prominent roles in the arts and public life. She enjoyed her time there, and, she later said, acquired a scholarly method and habit of mind which served her throughout her life. She was a distinguished student, and, in Kenney's view, Sayers's novels and essays reflect her liberal education at Oxford. |alt=red brick neo-classical exterior of large building Sayers was co-founder, with
Amphilis Middlemore and
Charis Ursula Barnett, of the
Mutual Admiration Society, a
literary society where female students would read and critique each other's work. Sayers gave the group its name, remarking, "if we didn't give ourselves that title, the rest of College would". The society was a forerunner of
the Inklings, the informal literary discussion group at Oxford; Sayers never belonged to the latter—an all-male group of writers—but became friendly with
C. S. Lewis and other members. Sayers, who was considered to have a good
contralto voice, joined the
Oxford Bach Choir and developed an unrequited passion for its director,
Hugh Allen. She studied diligently, with the encouragement of her tutor,
Mildred Pope, and in 1915 she was awarded
first class honours in what was termed modern (in fact medieval) French in her final examinations.
Early employment and first novel, 1916–1924 After graduating from Oxford, Sayers, who had begun writing verse in childhood, brought out two slim volumes of poetry,
Op. I (1916) and
Catholic Tales and Christian Songs (1918). Teaching did not greatly appeal to her, and in 1917 she secured a post with the publisher and bookseller
Basil Blackwell in Oxford. Returning to the city suited her well. A younger contemporary,
Doreen Wallace, later described her in these years: The post with Blackwell lasted for two years, after which Sayers moved to France. She was engaged in 1919 by a school near
Verneuil-sur-Avre in
Normandy as assistant to
Eric Whelpton, who was teaching English there. She had been in love with him at Oxford, and he was among the models for the appearance and character of Wimsey. In 1922 Sayers took a job as a
copywriter at
S. H. Benson, then Britain's largest advertising agency. She was, though, responsible for the introduction of the Guinness
toucan, painted by the artist
John Gilroy, for which she penned accompanying verse such as "If he can say as you can/Guinness is good for you/How grand to be a Toucan/Just think what Toucan do". The toucan was used in Guinness's advertisements for decades. Kenney writes that at Benson's, Sayers again enjoyed "some of the fun and camaraderie she had experienced as a student at Oxford". Some other reviews were more favourable: "the solution does not, as is so often the case, come as an anti-climax to disappoint expectations and lead the reader to feel that he has been 'had' ... We hope to hear from the noble sleuth again"; "We had hardly thought a woman writer could be so robustly gruesome ... a very diverting problem"; "First-rate construction ... a thoroughly satisfactory yarn from start to finish". Sayers's relationship with Cournos continued until 1922. After that affair ended she met a man, Bill White, by whom she had a son in 1924. The novelist
A. N. Wilson describes White as "motorcycling
rough trade". That liaison was short-lived—White turned out to be married—and the son, whom Sayers named John Anthony, was brought up by Ivy Shrimpton, who already had foster children in her care. Sayers concealed her son's parentage from him and from the world in general. She was known to him at first as "Cousin Dorothy", and she later posed as his adoptive mother. Only after her death were the facts made explicit.
Early novels, 1925–1929 Whose Body?, published in both Britain and the US, sold well enough for the London publishers,
Fisher Unwin, to ask for a sequel. Before that was published Sayers featured Wimsey in a short story, "The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager's Will", published in ''
Pearson's Magazine in July 1925, which, together with other short stories centred on Wimsey, came out in book form in Lord Peter Views the Body'' in 1928.
Clouds of Witness, the second Wimsey novel, was published in 1926, and was well received.
The Daily News commented: Other reviewers wrote of a "well-written and pulsating mystery story, with an astonishing number of clues cleverly evolved, and totally unexpected conclusion", and a "pleasantly-going and smartly-written detective story"; another commented, "Miss Sayers is frankly out to thrill us; but her novel is something far other than a typical shocker. Her characters (especially her hero) are very much alive, and she has an admirable narrative style and great constructive skill". With this second novel, Sayers was being compared with the established crime novelist
Agatha Christie as an author of detective stories that were also entertaining novels about human beings. The Wimsey novels continued with
Unnatural Death in 1927 and
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club in 1928. In that year Sayers published
Lord Peter Views the Body and edited and introduced an anthology of other writers' works,
Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror, retitled for its American edition the following year as
The Omnibus of Crime. In that year she published
Tristan in Brittany, a verse-and-prose translation of the 12th-century poetic fragments of
The Romance of Tristan by
Thomas of Britain. The scholar
George Saintsbury wrote an introduction to the book, and Sayers was praised for making a historically important poem available for the first time in modern English.
1930–1934 In 1930 Sayers became a founder member of the
Detection Club. This grew from informal dinners arranged by
Anthony Berkeley for writers of detective fiction "for the enjoyment of each other's company and for a little
shop talk". She was one of the club's most enthusiastic members; she devised its elaborate initiation ritual in which new members swore to write without relying on "Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God" and "to observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Conspiracies, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-Doors, Chinamen, Super-Criminals and Lunatics, and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science". The club charged no subscription fees, and to raise money for the acquisition of premises members contributed to collaborative works for broadcast or print. The first, organised by Sayers, was
Behind the Screen (1930) in which six club members took it in turn to read their own fifteen-minute episodes of a crime mystery on
BBC radio. Sayers published two novels in 1930. Prompted by a suggestion from a fellow author,
Robert Eustace, she worked on
The Documents in the Case. Eustace, a medical practitioner, provided the main plot device and scientific details; Sayers turned them into prose, hoping to write a novel in the manner of the 19th-century author
Wilkie Collins, whose work she admired. She was working on a biography of Collins and adopted his
first-person narrative technique in a story mostly told in exchanges of letters between the characters. Peter Wimsey does not appear in the book: Brabazon writes that Sayers "tasted the joys of freedom from Wimsey". Reviews were favourable, but gave only qualified praise. In
The Graphic, the writer
Evelyn Waugh contrasted Sayers and Christie: Sayers was disappointed with the book, and reproached herself for failing to do better with the material provided by her co-author. Brabazon describes Harriet as Sayers's
alter ego, sharing many attributes—favourable and otherwise—with the author. The writer
Mary Ellen Chase thought that Sayers had never been conventionally beautiful and after attending one of her lectures in the 1930s, she wrote "There can be few plainer women on earth than Dorothy Sayers [but] I have never come across one so magnetic to listen to". In 1931 Sayers collaborated with Detection Club colleagues on a longer serial for the BBC,
The Scoop, and on a book,
The Floating Admiral. Harriet Vane does not appear in that novel, but is the central character in the next Wimsey book,
Have His Carcase, published in 1932. Wimsey solves the murder but is no more successful in winning Harriet's love than he had been in
Strong Poison.
Have His Carcase was well received.
The Scotsman called it a book to "keep a jaded reviewer out of bed in the small hours";
The Times said that the final twist "is really startling and ingenious, and though the reader is given a perfectly fair chance of guessing it none but the most ingenious can hope to do so"; and the reviewer in
The Liverpool Echo called Sayers "the greatest of all detective story writers", though worried that her plots were so clever that some readers might struggle to keep up with them. '', 1933|upright Over the following two years Sayers published two Wimsey novels (neither featuring Harriet Vane)—
Murder Must Advertise (1933) and
The Nine Tailors (1934)—and a collection of short stories, ''
Hangman's Holiday, featuring not only the patrician Wimsey but also a proletarian salesman and solver of mysteries, Montague Egg. She edited a third and final volume of Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror
and began reviewing crime novels for The Sunday Times''. Her reviews covered works by most of her important contemporaries, including her fellow "Queens of Crime" of the
Golden Age of Detective Fiction—Christie and
Margery Allingham. Kenney comments that much of Sayers's thinking on the mystery novel and literature generally can be gleaned from her reviews, which reveal much about her attitude to art. She expected authors to write excellent prose and to avoid situations and plot devices already used by other writers. The rectory in which Wimsey and his manservant,
Bunter, are offered refuge after a car crash, resembles that in which Sayers grew up. and there were technical errors in her description of the practice. The book gained enthusiastic notices. In
The News Chronicle,
Charles Williams wrote that it was "not merely admirable; it is adorable. ... It is a great book".
The Daily Herald said, "This is unquestionably Miss Sayers's best—until the next one".
Last novels and early religious works, 1935–1939 In 1935 Sayers published what she intended to be the last Wimsey novel,
Gaudy Night, set in Harriet Vane's old Oxford college. There is attempted murder but Wimsey identifies the culprit in time to prevent further harm. At the end of the book Wimsey proposes to Harriet (in Latin) and is accepted (also in Latin). In Oxford in May, and in London in June, Sayers delivered a lecture entitled "Aristotle on Detective Fiction", humorously contending that in his
Poetics,
Aristotle shows that what he most wished for was a good detective story. The same year Sayers worked on a script for a film to be called
The Silent Passenger. Although she was promised editorial control, it was not forthcoming and the script was altered; according to her biographer David Coomes, the Wimsey character "looked like a member of the Mafia". Sayers was growing tired of the solitary vocation of a novelist, and was glad to collaborate with her old university friend Byrne on a new Wimsey story written for the theatre. ''Busman's Honeymoon'', "a detective comedy in three acts", had a short provincial tour before opening in the
West End. Sayers, who kept in close contact with her son, John, sent him an account of the demanding rehearsals for the opening, a milieu new to her. The London premiere was at the
Comedy Theatre in December 1936.
Dennis Arundell and
Veronica Turleigh played Wimsey and Harriet. It ran for more than a year, and while it was still running, Sayers rewrote it as a novel, published in 1937, the last of her full-length books featuring Wimsey. It opened in June 1937, was well reviewed, and made a profit for the festival. The following year Sayers returned to a religious theme with
He That Should Come, a radio
Nativity play, broadcast by the BBC on Christmas Day, and in 1939 the Canterbury Festival staged another of her plays,
The Devil to Pay.—and began a series of articles for
The Spectator called
The Wimsey Papers between 17 November 1939 and 26 January 1940, using Wimsey and his family and friends to convey Sayers's thoughts on life and politics in the early weeks of the Second World War.
Dante and The Man Born to Be King, 1940s For the theatre Sayers wrote a comedy,
Love All, a wry take on the
eternal triangle. It opened in a London
fringe theatre in April 1940. Notices were friendly—
The Times said that Sayers poked some agreeable fun at a number of conventions, sentimental, literary, and theatrical and
The Stage called the play "very amusing and provocative"—but at that stage of the war there was no demand for another light comedy in the West End, and there was no transfer. The task that preoccupied Sayers from the 1940s to the end of her life was her translation of
Dante Alighieri's
Divine Comedy. She said she began it after reading the original Italian version in an
air-raid shelter during bombing raids. She saw parallels between the writing and the state of the world during the war. She thought Dante was "simply the most incomparable story-teller who ever set pen to paper", and in addition to the parallels of the world during war, she believed that her society suffered from a lack of faith, declining morality, dishonesty, exploitation, disharmony and other similar problems, and believed that Dante shared the same view of his own. Some conservative Christians expressed outrage. The
Lord's Day Observance Society called it a "revolting imitation of the voice of our Divine Saviour and Redeemer" and declared, "to impersonate the Divine Son of God in this way is an act of irreverence bordering on the
blasphemous". The actor
Robert Speaight, who played Jesus, said the plays were successful because "we did not approach the parts in a reverential frame of mind. We approached them exactly as if it was any other kind of play". As the series progressed, the controversy died down. The BBC's religious advisory committee, representing all the major Christian denominations, was united in support of the cycle, which came to be regarded as one of Sayers's greatest achievements. Sayers's other main work from the wartime years was her extended essay
The Mind of the Maker, arguing that human creativity is the attribute that gives mankind its best chance of understanding, however imperfectly, the nature of God's mind. Between 1944 and 1949 she published two volumes of essays and a collection of stories for children, and wrote another religious play,
The Just Vengeance, commissioned for the 750th anniversary celebrations of
Lichfield Cathedral, which, she later said, was "very stale and abstract" and pleased theologians more than it pleased the actors. In 1949
Penguin Books published
The Divine Comedy, Cantica I, Hell in Sayers's translation. Reviews were excellent. One critic wrote, "Her translation ... is not only scholarly but is being hailed as the best English translation of that poem". In
The Observer,
Sir Ronald Storrs praised the "illuminating" translation and Sayers's "compendious notes", and said that future readers would be "profoundly in her debt".
The Chicago Tribune criticised some of the
archaisms in Sayers's version, but concluded "but all in all it looks to me like the translation to read ... you can't read very far into it and still think Dante is dull".
Last years, 1950–1957 '', Sayers's last translation (1957)|alt=15th-century painting depicting a marching army, priests in church, and an open battlefield In 1950 Sayers was awarded an honorary
Doctorate of Letters by the
University of Durham. After years of declining health her husband Mac died at their home in Witham in June 1950. The following year, for the
Festival of Britain, she wrote her last play,
The Emperor Constantine, described by
The Stage as "long, rambling, episodic, and wholly absorbing". Sayers made a last foray into crime fiction in 1953 with
No Flowers By Request, another collaborative serial, published in
The Daily Sketch, co-written with
E. C. R. Lorac,
Anthony Gilbert,
Gladys Mitchell and
Christianna Brand. The following year she published
Introductory Papers on Dante, and in 1955 Penguin Books published
Purgatory, the second volume of her translation of
The Divine Comedy. Like its predecessor, it enjoyed substantial sales. On 17 December 1957 Sayers died suddenly of a
coronary thrombosis at her home in Witham, aged 64; she was cremated six days later at
Golders Green Crematorium. Her ashes were buried at the base of the tower of
St Anne's Church, Soho. Her translation of the third and final volume of
The Divine Comedy, two-thirds complete, was finished by
Barbara Reynolds. ==Works==