Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) was an English crime novelist, playwright and translator, creator of the aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey. She was born in Oxford on 13 June 1893 and died in Witham, Essex, on 17 December 1957.

She was educated at the Godolphin School in Salisbury and Somerville College, Oxford, taking first-class honours in modern languages in 1915; when Oxford began awarding degrees to women in 1920 she was among the first to receive one. She worked for Blackwell's and then as a copywriter at the advertising agency S. H. Benson from 1922 to 1929. Wimsey first appeared in Whose Body? (1923). Harriet Vane was introduced in Strong Poison (1930), and the series continued with Murder Must Advertise (1933), The Nine Tailors (1934), Gaudy Night (1935) and Busman's Honeymoon (1937). She was a founder member of the Detection Club in 1930 and later became its president. Later she turned to religious drama, including the BBC radio cycle The Man Born to Be King (1941 to 1942), and to translating Dante's Divine Comedy; Hell appeared in 1949 and Purgatory in 1955, with the third part completed after her death by Barbara Reynolds and published in 1962.

For collectors, Whose Body? (1923) is the cornerstone: it was published in the United States by Boni & Liveright and in Britain by T. Fisher Unwin. A line in the 1923 text about Sir Reuben Levy's Jewish faith was rewritten in later editions, so the original wording helps identify early copies. Gaudy Night (1935), the novel in which Wimsey proposes to Harriet Vane, was first published in London by Victor Gollancz.